(1)

By Decision 94/800/EC (4) the Council concluded the Agreement on Government Procurement (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Agreement’). The Agreement should be applied to any procurement contract with a value that reaches or exceeds the amounts (hereinafter referred to as ‘thresholds’) set in the Agreement and expressed as special drawing rights.

(2)

One of the objectives of Directives 2004/17/EC and 2004/18/EC is to allow the contracting entities and the contracting authorities which apply those Directives to comply at the same time with the obligations laid down in the Agreement. To achieve this, the thresholds laid down by those Directives for public contracts which are also covered by the Agreement should be aligned in order to ensure that they correspond to the euro equivalents, rounded down to the nearest thousand, of the thresholds set out in the Agreement.

(3)

For reasons of coherence, it is appropriate to align also those thresholds in Directives 2004/17/EC and 2004/18/EC which are not covered by the Agreement. At the same time, the thresholds laid down by Directive 2009/81/EC should be aligned to the revised thresholds laid down in Article 16 of Directive 2004/17/EC.

(4)

Directives 2004/17/EC, 2004/18/EC and 2009/81/EC should therefore be amended accordingly.

(5)

The measures provided for in this Regulation are in accordance with the opinion of the Advisory Committee for Public Contracts,

(1)

Article 16 is amended as follows:

(2)

Article 61 is amended as follows:

(1)

Article 7 is amended as follows:

(2)

the first paragraph of Article 8 is amended as follows:

(3)

in Article 56, the amount ‘EUR 5 000 000’ is replaced by ‘EUR 5 186 000’;

(4)

in the first subparagraph of Article 63(1), the amount ‘EUR 5 000 000’ is replaced by ‘EUR 5 186 000’;

(5)

Article 67(1) is amended as follows:

(1)

in point (a), the amount ‘EUR 400 000’ is replaced by ‘EUR 414 000’;

(2)

in point (b), the amount ‘EUR 5 000 000’ is replaced by ‘EUR 5 186 000’.