Ioan Baciu

As one of the most proficient Romanian lawyers in many areas of practice, Mr. Baciu has counselled, on a regular basis, major foreign investors in connection with the implementation of an impressive number of projects and deals, offering strategic legal advice at the interface of regulation, competition and business management.

His vast expertise stretches from public procurement and sustainable development to cybersecurity and data protection, e-distribution and supply chain, intellectual property, health and pharma, food law, e-commerce and consumer’s rights, metadata and Government clouding, real estate or capital markets. He also has substantial proven track record in international consultancy and training in regulatory affairs and public governance.

Between 2013 and 2018, Mr. Baciu was a member of the European Commission stakeholder expert group on public procurement. In this capacity, he has provided the European Commission with legal, technical and practical insights and expertise with a view to assisting it in shaping the public procurement policy of the Union.

In 2017, Mr. Baciu has been appointed as one of the European Commission’s co-opted experts for the implementation of the Cohesion Policy and the Union’s regional and urban development, capacity in which he contributed to the implementation of various cohesion projects. Moreover, in August 2022 Mr. Baciu has been selected to be included on the EU’s official list of highly reputed experts in public procurement.

Based on his noteworthy competences and extensive experience, Mr. Baciu has been selected in the last years, together with other top EU legal experts, to take part in several important projects ran by the European Commission and other EU institutions. Additionally, he has been directly involved, as policy expert, in the initiation, the crafting and the implementation, at national level, of several key public policies on, inter alia, the integration or reintegration of disabled and disadvantaged persons and the promotion of gender equality and a gender-equality economy.

Mr. Baciu is Doctor in Law (PhD) from both the University of Turin, Italy, and Babes Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca, Romania, his research focusing on the possibility to pursue social policy goals, via public procurement, in the EU’s extraordinarily complex internal market context. And, as an indication of its value, his thesis has been awarded the prestigious NISPAcee Mzia Mikeladze PhD Award (best PhD thesis in 2021) for its ‘remarkable contribution to the development of national and regional public administration and local governance practices across the CEE’.

Mr. Baciu also is a member and researcher of several top-tier organizations which gather together a carefully selected number of eminent procurement executives and researchers from centres of excellence in procurement around the world.

Besides all that, Mr. Baciu is a constant speaker/lecturer at numerous international conferences and seminars, but also a frequent contributor to the legal press and journals (he being, among others, country correspondent for the European Procurement & Public Private Partnership Law Review – EPPPL) or to the World Bank’s and other international organizations’ research projects, delivering notably complex articles, studies, surveys and reports on various legal aspects.