A Dead-End Branch of Appeal: How the Supervisory Authority Ignores the Signals of an External Reporter

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Abstract

The right to appeal a decision of a supervisory authority to a higher instance belongs to the standard set of guarantees of a procurement system and is counted by international assessment methodologies as a mark of its maturity. This report traces the fate of 28 applications filed by different applicants to the central office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia following the consideration of complaints about procurement procedures under laws 44-FZ and 223-FZ between March and August 2026. The central office acts as the second supervisory instance in relation to the decisions of the territorial offices.

Data. The CILC register: 427 procedures under laws 44-FZ and 223-FZ in 68 regions, with a combined initial price of RUB 980.5 million (about USD 11.8 million) and bid submission deadlines falling between 30 March and 19 August 2026; in 369 procedures a decision was taken on the merits. From this body of data, 28 applications to the second instance were isolated; in addition, a documented case brought by an independent applicant was examined, which gives a complete cycle of a signal passing through both instances. The anonymised dataset is published separately under a CC BY 4.0 licence (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22236602).

Principal findings. Not one of the 28 applications was considered on the merits: 24 were returned without consideration, and 4 received replies in the form of letters whose subject was the territorial office's compliance with internal procedural deadlines rather than the substance of the procurement dispute. The result is zero irrespective of the applicant, the region, the legal regime, the procurement method and the price of the procedure. At the first instance the same material yields 24.9 per cent of confirmed violations, and between territorial offices the share of confirmations ranges from 0 to 55 per cent.

The legal structure. The outcome is consistent with the structure of administrative appeal as the second instance itself sets it out, including an express statement that it holds no power of review over complaints considered under article 18.1 of the law on the protection of competition. For the regime of law 44-FZ no such conclusion follows from the provisions cited, and the zero result is established here empirically.

Conclusions. Four documented forms in which a signal ends without being processed are identified, including the limiting case: a finding that the actions of a territorial office were unlawful which carries no legal consequences. A working hypothesis is formulated about the functional equivalence of such an instance to the absence of an instance within the meaning of chapter VIII of the UNCITRAL Model Law and article 9 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption.

The report is deposited in English, Russian and Spanish.

Recommended citation

Limarau, D. (2026). A Dead-End Branch of Appeal: How the Supervisory Authority Ignores the Signals of an External Reporter. Report. Consejo Internacional para la Lucha contra la Corrupción. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22819817. https://cilclegal.org/