During his stint as defense minister from 1996 to 2001 and for several years after that, Mr. Tsochatzopoulos is accused of having used a network of offshore companies to siphon off millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for procurement contracts, including the purchase of a Russian missile-defense system and German submarines.
As Clea Kahn and Elena Lucchi from the Médecins Sans Frontières operational centre in Amsterdam have argued in Humanitarian Exchange Magazine, local procurement can risk neutrality, especially in conflict zones where opposing sides control vital goods and services.
And Del Clark, head of Phillips Petroleum's Y2K project, became director of global e-business overseeing the company's participation on projects like the Web-based procurement exchange that Phillips and 13 other oil and chemical companies set up this year.
Oracle is helping Wal-Mart's McLane subsidiary set up a procurement exchange with Chevron.
"Purchasing may be farmed out to the very Internet exchanges that the procurement officers are being lauded for setting up," said Robert P. Derocher, an e-commerce expert at Deloitte Consulting.
If governments are not sure how their rivals will react, in terms of exchange-rate policy, procurement, subsidies and the rest, we may not get the co-ordinated response the world needs.
Now, that isn't to say there isn't confidential information that can be exchanged during the procurement process with sensitive agencies like the Defense Department.
Nevertheless, contemporary textual evidence and shared patterns of architecture, technology, and artisanship, including carved cross stones indicate that these communities were nodes in regional networks of institutional affiliation, shared religious practice, and material procurement or exchange.
Rare Crowds has invented a new type of premium ad inventory called a "rare crowd" that can be sold by publishers and ad networks, and can be used for inventory procurement across exchanges.
