The activities carried out by the Expert Group on Judicial Auctions within the e-Justice Action Plan 2014-2018 highlighted that the cooperation among Member States, in the asset sales process in judicial enforcement procedures, is addressed at EU level by simple informative pages in the e-Justice portal. The information provided is related to a basic terminology used in auctions, a list of the Member States currently providing a national on-line judicial auctions system, the kind of auctions handled and links to the national auction web portals (in any). To date, information for less than the half of the Member States is published in the e-Justice portal.
The empirical analysis outlined that:
Most portals are only in local language
National portals are differently indexed by the web search engines, i.e., they usually don’t appear among the first items of a search results page in Google or other engines
Third parties’ private portals might have information that is not always updated or correct, or lacking any sort of verification or certification from the official information owners
National portals neither provide uniform look and feel, nor uniform search criteria
All national systems have a national scope: it is not possible for a user to search for transnational sales, which would be useful for both local businesses seeking expansion and investors looking for branches of companies on sale.
In 2020, an analysis of the status quo showed the judicial auctions sector is fragmented at national level, with a negative impact on the competition among potential buyers at EU level, on the sales values and on the time to conclude sales. Thus, the following needs have been identified as key factors for overcoming the detected weaknesses of the sector:
Possibility for citizens and companies to easily access, without intermediaries, information on goods to be sold in judicial auctions taking place in one or more Member States, through a one-stop-shop
Possibility to compare the goods from different countries, to evaluate the most suitable for the specific interest of a single user
Presence of a pan-European network interconnecting Member States judicial auctions national systems, enabling users in accessing only certified and reliable information.
Considering the above, the LEILA project was conceived in 2020 with the aim to reflect on these needs and fill the gaps in the cross-border cooperation in judicial auctions domain by providing a multilingual pilot platform where information about goods to be sold in judicial auctions across EU is reported together with related regulations.
To facilitating complex searches, thus extending single national boundaries and enabling users to compare the search results in a selected language, information fields are to be standardized and translated in all the EU official languages, while automatic translation system is applied only to free text. This functionality will be complemented by a simple and intuitive graphic user interface.
The pilot platform is to be integrated with the national providers’ case management systems of Italy, Latvia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Portugal, France, and Lithuania, to retrieve auctions’ official and up-to-date data in a completely automated way. The possibility for manual upload and update of information where such (an) information system(s) on national level does not yet exist shall be further developed to secure the EU-wide adoption of the platform.
We are now initiating the first steps towards (1) mapping project stakeholders to secure their engagement in project activities and (2) data gathering of stakeholders’ requirements and best practices.
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