Ms Isolde Goggin:

It is difficult to put a figure on it because we do not know how much there is, because it is a secret. We end up going around in circles on it. If we had the tools, we could get more evidence and then we would know how much it was. If one looks at the scale of public procurement it would not take long to get into the hundreds of millions even if the scale of bid rigging is quite low. We know from the experience in other countries that it can easily be up to 1% or 2% of public procurement. It would not take one long to get into very substantial amounts of money. What we think is that having bid rigging as a separate offence will make it easier to prosecute because it will make it clearer what the event is that is occurring. We know, for instance, from our colleagues in Germany, the Bundeskartellamt, which has a separate offence of bid rigging, that they are kept very busy. It has a separate unit that does nothing but investigations into bid rigging. I could see us potentially getting to that scale. It has to be brought out into the open because the more people see something like this happen, the more they will look at it and say it is wrong, that it is not right because it is taxpayers' money that is being stolen.