Duty to state reasons
The duty to state reasons obliges the contracting authority to substantiate its decisions with concrete, verifiable grounds. This applies to the award, selection, exclusion and evaluation of tenders. The Council of State verifies whether the reasoning is sufficiently concrete and adequate — inadequate reasoning can lead to annulment.
OEKO-TEX is not the same as EU-Ecolabel — and the contracting authority is not there to repair your tender
The Council of State dismisses an extreme-urgency suspension brought by a furniture bidder whose tender was rejected because, for fabrics requiring 'EU-Ecolabel or equivalent', it offered only OEKO-TEX Standard 100, ruling that proving equivalence is the bidder's job — not the contracting authority's.
You wrote in your own specifications that a third party must accept joint liability for financial capacity. Arguing on the day of the hearing that your own clause is illegal won't save you
Sibelga selects Illunis for lot 6 on the back of a French company's turnover (Rohl), but Rohl never signed a written acceptance of joint liability — even though Sibelga itself had required that acceptance in its selection dossier.
A signed contract does not protect your award — the contracting authority can still withdraw it up to 60 days later
The Council of State dismisses the extreme-urgency appeal of a contractor whose award was withdrawn after the contracting authority discovered that the engineering office had wrongly scored a bid, and confirms that the classical withdrawal doctrine applies — even when the contract has already been signed.
An ordinal scale with scores to two decimal places: here 'intermediate values allowed' becomes a smokescreen for undisclosed sub-sub-criteria
Zorgbedrijf Antwerpen scores bids for a Menu Management System on an ordinal 50/55/70/85/100% scale with 'intermediate values allowed', but the evaluation report produces scores to the hundredth — which can only be explained by a hidden split into sub-sub-award criteria that appears nowhere in the specifications.
MDD Pharma was allowed to 'clarify' daily delivery into weekly — Multipharma wasn't allowed to fix its 'forbidden variant'. Two weights, equal treatment thrown out
Ixelles' public welfare centre lets one bidder convert daily delivery into weekly after a 'request for clarification', but denies another bidder the chance to fix a similar irregularity — without explaining why the two situations differ.
Below the European threshold the contracting authority MAY allow regularisation of a missing tender form — and the applicant had three days to challenge that, not until the hearing
The Council of State dismisses Brion & Charlot's extreme-urgency suspension against the award of an intensive-care interior contract to Emil Palm, confirming that in a negotiated procedure below the European threshold a contracting authority may allow a substantial irregularity (here: a missing final offer form) to be regularised — and adding a procedural lesson: those finding their competitor's price drop suspicious must request the lifting of confidentiality BEFORE the hearing, not at it.
What the tender documents say is what counts — second thoughts about what you 'meant' come too late
The Council of State suspends the award of a framework contract for temporary staff because CHR Haute Senne disqualified X-CARE Wallonie for an ISO 9001 certificate expiring eight days after bid opening — while the tender documents only required the certificate to be valid 'at the time of bid submission'.
What if the Council of State annuls a Royal Decree six days before your contract award?
The Council of State suspends a re-awarded public contract because the Province of Liège withdrew its first award to Onefield ICT and reassigned it to a competitor after the retroactive annulment of the Royal Decree on accreditation classes, without first inviting the bidder to rely on the capacity of an affiliated group company.
A missing safety plan is not a selection issue, and an unattached analysis report cannot retroactively explain the decision
The Council of State suspends a demolition contract of €210,520 because the contracting authority declared a bidder 'not selected' due to a missing safety plan (PPSS) — which is not a selection criterion — and because the analysis report explaining why the offer was considered irregular was not included with the notification.
If two of three bidders had to fix their offers, 'a number of offers had irregularities' is not a motivation
The Council of State suspends the award of lot 6 of De Watergroep's framework agreement for grounds maintenance because the award report only mentioned that 'a number of offers' had been regularised, without specifying which bidders, which issues, and what the outcome was — while in fact two of the three bidders had received regularisation requests.
Your award was annulled, but that doesn't entitle you to full lost revenue — the Council of State awards 5% of the offer price, not 73%
Following the annulment of the SEN5 award in judgment 260,900, Pluris claimed €69,506 in damages based on lost revenue; the Council of State recognises only a 50% loss of chance and awards €4,742.50 — 5% of the offer price of €94,850.
Incumbent scores 18/20 on 'creativity', challenger 8/20 — yet no unfair advantage, says Council of State
The Council of State holds that a 10-point gap on 20 for 'creativity and originality' between the incumbent service provider and the challenger is not unlawful, because the tender documents explicitly asked for a moodboard 'based on the current magazine' and the existing publication was publicly available online to all bidders.
When you ask the lowest bidder to justify both total price and three unit prices — and he answers only on the three unit prices
The Council of State suspends an award for 448,857 euros in an open procedure because the authority asked the winner to justify both the total price and three suspect unit prices, the winner justified only those three unit prices, and the authority's decision does not say a word about the missing justification for the total.
Explaining your own scoring formula in the response brief is too late — the award is annulled
The Council of State annuls the concession for three LED information boards in Kontich because the municipality only managed to explain what its own screen-time scoring formula meant during the proceedings — and because the 'Tmax = 16' used in the formula did not match the 15-point maximum score stated in the guidelines.
'Those guardrail end-pieces are already in our stock' — accepted as a price justification
The Council of State rejects the suspension request from the second-ranked bidder because Fluvius was entitled to accept that a low unit price for steel guardrail end-pieces was explained by the fact that the winning bidder already had them in stock, fully depreciated.
Bidder's experience as an award criterion: the Flemish Mobility department trips over the selection/award distinction
The Council of State suspends the award of a framework agreement for project preparation along waterways because the second award criterion effectively assessed the bidder's experience — a classic selection criterion — rather than the intrinsic value of the offer.
Ten new waste trucks for nearly the same price as three new and seven old ones — still not an abnormally low price?
The Council of State rejects the claim of the incumbent waste collector that the winning tenderer cannot possibly offer a comparable total price with ten new trucks when the claimant used only three new and seven depreciated ones, because the total price exceeded the estimate, deviated less than 15% from the average, and truck costs were not a visible line item.
A scoring scale from 'weak' to 'excellent' without further explanation — prima facie transparent enough
The Council of State rejects the suspension request of a postal services company challenging the award of a framework agreement, ruling that a qualitative evaluation method with an ordinal scale (weak/moderate/good/very good/excellent) is sufficiently transparent when the specifications contain evaluation elements and technical provisions that define the framework.
Use your own argument to torpedo the contract — then complain it won't be relaunched
The Council of State rejects Pluxee's claim against Charleroi's decision to renounce an electronic meal voucher contract, because the decisive motive — the irregular tender specifications — was precisely the argument Pluxee itself had raised in an earlier appeal.
Classified information about your shareholder? Defence doesn't have to explain what exactly is going on
The Council of State rules that Defence may exclude a company from a European defence project based on classified intelligence about its sole shareholder, even though the precise content of that information cannot be disclosed.
Defence may exclude a company based on classified intelligence — without revealing what it is
The Council of State rejects the claim of a defence company excluded from a DEFRA research consortium based on classified military intelligence about the integrity of its sole shareholder — even though that information cannot be disclosed.
Fail to correct the same errors through three offer rounds? The authority doesn't have to give you a fourth chance
The Council of State rejects the claim by Sopra Steria and IDEMIA against their exclusion from an €80 million contract for a biometric identification system for the police, because they kept repeating the same irregularities after three offer rounds and repeated regularization requests.
One failed price justification is enough — everything else becomes irrelevant
The Council of State rejects a contractor's claim after its tender was declared irregular due to abnormally low unit prices — because the price justification for two undisputedly non-negligible items was already insufficient on its own, all other challenges became moot.
Five arguments, zero hits: why a losing towing company runs into the limits of its own case
The Council of State rejects all five grounds raised by a towing company challenging the award of a towing contract to its competitor — from a missing enterprise number to alleged environmental violations and a disputed price investigation.
Vlaamse regering verklaarde offerte personeelvervoer onregelmatig zonder volledige prijsanalyse
Schorsing was gerechtvaardigd: de regering verklaarde een offerte abnormaal hoog zonder te onderzoeken of het verschil met concurrenten werkelijk ongegrond was.
Kerkfabriek verzuimde abnormaal lage eenheidsprijs te onderzoeken bij dakreparatie
De Raad vernietigde de gunning: hoewel de kerkfabriek in het initiële rapport een eenheidsprijs als abnormaal laag had aangemerkt, onderzocht zij deze niet opnieuw bij de herziene gunningsbeslissing.
Commune vierde barrières-offerte af zonder motivering waarom technische afwijkingen essentieel waren
Schorsing: de gemeente verklaarde een offerte substantieel onregelmatig zonder helder te motiveren dat de technische afwijkingen (niet-monobloc, kleiner) inderdaad onoverkomelijk waren voor het marchéobject.
Gemeente Zwevegem handelde correct bij aanvaarding prijsverantwoording parkbegraafplaats
De Raad wees het beroep af: de prijs van de gekozen inschrijver lag slechts 15% onder gemiddelde, een legitieme prijsverantwoording was gegeven, en verzoekende partij kon niet aantonen waarom haar offerte meer voordeel zou mogen hebben.
Stad Brussel schendt zorgvuldigheidsbeginsel bij prijs- en kostenonderzoek voor asfalteringswerken
De Raad vernietigde de gunningsbeslissing omdat de stad ten onrechte geen zorgvuldig prijsonderzoek uitvoerde: zij verhoogde het wettelijk afwijkingspercentage van 15% naar 25%, waardoor geen prijsbevraging bij de gekozen inschrijver plaatsvond.
Negative prices for meal vouchers — 'that's how the sector works' is not sufficient motivation
The Council of State suspends the award of a framework agreement for electronic meal vouchers to Edenred Belgium, because the price investigation motivation was too generic — the contracting authority justified all three tenders globally based on sector characteristics, without individually explaining why the winning tenderer's specific price justification was acceptable.
One-hour emergency response for Christmas lights in Jette — but the authority forgot to check if that was realistic
The Council of State suspends the award of a holiday illumination contract in Jette because the authority failed to verify whether the one-hour intervention time offered by two tenderers was realistic, despite multiple red flags — including the fact that the offer was submitted by a different legal entity than the one to whom the contract was awarded.
Solar panels on the UZ Gent parking structure — no unlimited freedom of choice when the specifications contain a formula
The Council of State rejects the claim of a solar panel company challenging the award of an installation contract, ruling that a price criterion based on the total bill of quantities creates no unlimited freedom of choice, and that an annual yield criterion with mandatory PVsyst simulation provides prima facie objective verification.
What the specifications say, you must price — even if you think it doesn't belong there
A tenderer who expressly confirms during price clarification that coordination of works in the other lots is not included in its offer is rightly declared substantially irregular — even if it believes the specifications do not require such coordination.
Referring to framework agreements without concrete execution details does not suffice as a reference
A tenderer that merely refers to framework agreements as references without specifying which lots were awarded, what deliveries were actually made, for what value and when, fails to adequately substantiate its offer and is rightly not selected.
The actual subject matter of the contract determines the required contractor recognition category — and the opening report need not be actively distributed
The Council rejects two grounds: the contracting authority could reasonably require recognition in subcategory F2 because steelwork represents the largest percentage of the contract sum, and not actively distributing the opening report via e-Procurement is not a violation when the provisional ranking was communicated.
Authority may not deviate from interpretation used by its mandatary during negotiations
When a mandated entity applies a particular interpretation of tender conditions during negotiations, the contracting authority may not depart from it in the award decision without giving candidates the opportunity to submit a new offer.
With only two tenders, one is not a benchmark for the other — and an 'expectation' in the specifications is not an essential minimum requirement
The Council rejects three grounds: a large price difference on one item does not suffice to establish an abnormal price when the authority conducted a substantiated general price investigation, specifying that one 'expects' something to be fully digital is not a pass/fail minimum requirement, and selective criticism of sub-elements of the reasoning does not undermine a global assessment.
A 134-seat planetarium scores the same as a 156-seat one — while the specifications ask for 150
The Council of State annuls the award of an architecture contract for a planetarium because the authority gave the same score to a 134-seat reference and a 156-seat reference for the sub-sub-criterion 'up to 150 seats', without motivation — and a post-hoc rule-of-three calculation cannot serve as justification.
A certificate that you'll meet the deadline is not an execution schedule — even if you call it one
The Council of State rejects the suspension request of a contractor whose offer was declared substantially irregular because it submitted a certificate of compliance instead of a detailed execution schedule, and only provided the actual schedule after being questioned — too late in an open procedure.
In a global qualitative assessment, isolated sub-elements don't count separately — and a concise selection report suffices when no issues arise
The Council rejects both grounds: criticizing a few sub-elements is insufficient to undermine a global qualitative assessment, and the contracting authority need not set out the selection examination in extenso when no problems arise.
A €10 million administrative centre awarded without price investigation — and the BAFO not even checked
The Council of State annuls the award of a Design, Build & Maintain contract for an administrative centre in Ronse because neither the award report nor the administrative file shows that a price investigation was conducted on the initial tenders or on the winning tenderer's BAFO.
0.5% screening threshold in price investigation passes legality test
A contracting authority may apply a weight threshold during price investigation to select non-negligible items, provided the threshold is carefully established and stays within the bounds of reasonableness.
A towing company whose permit doesn't allow night work complains the competitor has the same problem — but that actually weakens the argument
The Council of State rejects the suspension request of a towing company challenging the award of a framework agreement for towing and vehicle storage services, ruling that a contracting authority need not question the adequacy of submitted environmental permits for 24-hour service, especially when the applicant's own permit has the same limitation.
Picking up litter at 6.8 km/h — the tenderer promises it, but the authority doesn't buy it
The Council of State rejects the suspension request of a highway maintenance contractor whose offer was excluded for abnormal pricing, because the proposed productivity — 163 km of litter picking in three days, or 6.8 km/h while walking and bending — is prima facie unrealistic.
Suspension application under extreme urgency by consortium against discontinuation of sale-with-development-obligation for Sinbad site in Sint-Niklaas rejected – discontinuation due to economic infeasibility and need to amend specifications adequately reasoned under Article 85 of the 2016 Act; complaint about compensation condition inadmissible due to material error in contested decision
The Council of State rejected the suspension application under extreme urgency by a consortium of four companies against the decision of the Sint-Niklaas mayor and aldermen to discontinue the procurement procedure for the sale with development obligation of the Sinbad site, because the first part of the single ground (breach of duty to state reasons) was not serious — the discontinuation was adequately reasoned under Article 85 of the 2016 Act, as the administrative file showed that participating parties had repeatedly indicated during the procedure that the conditions were economically infeasible and the need to amend the specifications constituted an acceptable reason — and the second part (regarding the €7,500 compensation linked to a condition not to participate in the new procedure) was entirely inadmissible, inter alia because the condition was a material error acknowledged by the respondent; costs were nevertheless charged to the respondent because the correct reading of the contested decision could only be established from documents in the administrative file not previously available to the applicants.
Het toelaten van prijskortingen bij combinaties van percelen is geen wezenlijke bestekwijziging — en een trager vergroeningsritme dan de LEZ-regelgeving mogelijk voorschrijft, maakt een offerte niet automatisch onregelmatig
De Raad van State verwerpt het beroep tot nietigverklaring van de gunning van een opdracht voor de exploitatie en vergroening van geregeld busvervoer (West 1, zestien percelen), omdat (1) het invoeren van een 'combinatiemogelijkheid' voor percelen vanaf de derde bestekversie geen wezenlijke wijziging was maar het louter expliciteren van de bestaande mogelijkheid tot prijskorting bij meerdere percelen op grond van artikel 58 KB speciale sectoren, (2) de offerte van de gekozen inschrijver voor het Gentse perceel niet substantieel onregelmatig was wegens de LEZ-regelgeving — nu de regelgeving uitdrukkelijk in een systeem van individuele toelatingen voorziet voor de periode 2027-2030 en niet vaststaat dat na 2030 geen toelatingen meer mogelijk zijn, (3) de aanbestedende overheid een omstandig prijsonderzoek heeft gevoerd dat het prijsverschil van 36,5% afdoende verklaarde door verschillen in financieringsmodel, infrastructuurkosten en vergroeningsritme, zonder dat een bijzonder onderzoek naar abnormale prijzen vereist was, (4) de vorming van een tijdelijke maatschap door zeven geselecteerde entiteiten uit dezelfde groep rechtsgeldig was en geen mededingingsbeperkende handeling inhield, en (5) het beweerde belangenconflict in hoofde van de CEO van de moedergroep van de gekozen inschrijver — tevens voorzitter van de sectorfederatie — niet verder kwam dan loutere beweringen en veronderstellingen.
Een bestek dat monopolietaken van gerechtsdeurwaarders opneemt in het prijscriterium is fundamenteel onwettig — en een bevraging achteraf kan dat gebrek niet verhelpen
De Raad van State vernietigt de gunning van een opdracht voor debiteurenbeheer via een gerechtsdeurwaarder, omdat het bestek de monopoliebevoegdheden van gerechtsdeurwaarders — waarvoor wettelijk vastgestelde tarieven gelden die niet aan prijsconcurrentie mogen worden onderworpen — opnam in de inventaris die diende als basis voor het gunningscriterium prijs, en de aanbestedende overheid bij de beoordeling van dat criterium vervolgens afweek van het bestek door de inventarisprijzen te vervangen door het resultaat van een informele bevraging over de 'minnelijke fase' — een begrip dat niet in het bestek voorkwam — waardoor de inschrijvers bij het opstellen van hun offerte niet konden voorzien hoe het prijscriterium zou worden beoordeeld.
Onvoldoende motivering bij uitsluiting wegens abnormale prijzen: de beslissing moet duidelijk maken of de prijsverantwoordingen onontvankelijk dan wel ongegrond zijn
De Raad van State vernietigt — via de versnelde procedure na schorsing — de gunningsbeslissing van een overheidsopdracht voor wegenonderhoud, omdat de motivering van de uitsluiting wegens abnormale prijzen dubbelzinnig was: enerzijds bleek niet of de prijsverantwoordingen als onontvankelijk dan wel als ongegrond werden beschouwd, anderzijds stemden de motieven in de gunningsbeslissing niet overeen met die in het analyseverslag, zodat de geweerde inschrijver de werkelijke redenen van zijn uitsluiting niet kon achterhalen — en het argument van vertrouwelijkheid rechtvaardigt weliswaar een beknopte motivering, maar geen buitensporig summiere.
Handtekeningen op verbintenisverklaringen van derden die niet overeenstemmen met de identiteitskaart mogen als onbewijskrachtig worden geweigerd — en de aanbestedende overheid hoeft de inschrijver geen tweede kans te geven
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing bij uiterst dringende noodzakelijkheid van de niet-selectie van een inschrijver bij een raamovereenkomst voor loodgieterswerken, omdat (1) de aanbestedende overheid de verbintenisverklaringen van twee onderaannemers als onbewijskrachtig mocht weigeren wegens niet-overeenstemmende handtekeningen met hun identiteitskaart — wat geen schending is van de bewijskracht van een onderhandse akte maar een vaststelling dat de verklaringen de beweerde verbintenissen niet aantonen, (2) de formele motivering afdoende was nu zij de concrete reden van de weigering vermeldde, en (3) de zorgvuldigheidsplicht de aanbestedende overheid niet verplichtte om de inschrijver nogmaals te bevragen nadat zij reeds gebruik had gemaakt van de mogelijkheid om aanvullende informatie op te vragen na de opening van de offertes.
Een groot prijsverschil alleen volstaat niet om een bijzonder onderzoek naar abnormale prijzen te verplichten — en vertrouwelijkheid rechtvaardigt dat de details van een prijstoelichting niet in het gunningsverslag staan
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing bij uiterst dringende noodzakelijkheid van de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor reisdiensten, omdat (1) de aanbestedende overheid wel degelijk een algemeen prijsonderzoek heeft gevoerd — met een interne prijsvergelijking en een gerichte bevraging van de twee scherpst biedende inschrijvers — en na afdoende toelichting terecht kon concluderen dat geen sprake was van schijnbaar abnormale prijzen, (2) het loutere bestaan van een groot prijsverschil (57%) tussen offertes niet automatisch de verplichting doet ontstaan om over te gaan tot een bijzonder onderzoek naar abnormale prijzen, nu de aanbestedende overheid een ruime beoordelingsvrijheid heeft — zeker bij intellectuele diensten — en het feit dat de gekozen inschrijver als zittende dienstverlener haar scherpere prijzen kon verantwoorden met franchisewijzigingen, omzetstijging en technologische optimalisatie, en (3) de gekozen inschrijver haar offerte niet onrechtmatig had gewijzigd door afzonderlijke tarieven voor online en offline boekingen op te geven, nu het bestek zelf die mogelijkheid voorzag bij de omschrijving van het gunningscriterium 'online boekingssysteem'.
De aanwijzing van een voorkeurbieder in een onderhandelingsprocedure voor treinstellen van 3,3 miljard euro doorstaat de toets — ook al scoort de goedkoopste inschrijver technisch lager en ook al is de beoordelingsmethode pas na opening van de offertes uitgewerkt
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing bij uiterst dringende noodzakelijkheid van de tweede gunningsbeslissing voor een raamovereenkomst voor de levering van elektrische en batterijelektrische treinstellen (AM30) ter waarde van meer dan 3,3 miljard euro, omdat (1) de aanbestedende overheid na een eerdere succesvolle schorsing de motivering van het technisch criterium afdoende heeft verbeterd, (2) de beoordelingsmethode — een plus/min-waardensysteem voor het technisch criterium — niet vooraf in de opdrachtdocumenten hoefde te worden aangekondigd, mits zij coherent is en de gunningscriteria niet denatureert (toepassing TNS Dimarso), (3) de keuze om na vier onderhandelingsrondes over te gaan tot aanwijzing van een voorkeurbieder in plaats van een vijfde onderhandelingsronde niet kennelijk onredelijk is, (4) de beweerde specifieke beoordelingsfouten bij de technische, contractuele en energiecriteria het puntenverschil niet overbruggen, en (5) het argument dat de aanbestedende overheid de uitsluitingsgronden had moeten onderzoeken wegens de activiteiten van de gekozen inschrijver in bezet Palestijns gebied prematuur is, nu de bestreden beslissing slechts een voorkeurbieder aanwijst en geen definitieve gunning inhoudt.
Een inschrijver die zelf 'niet conform' invult voor een essentiële eis, kan achteraf niet beweren dat hij wél kon voldoen — en een bestek dat aansluit bij eerdere voertuigen is niet automatisch op maat van de zittende inschrijver geschreven
De Raad van State verwerpt het beroep tot nietigverklaring van de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor de levering van multifunctionele brandweerautopompen 4x4, omdat (1) de verzoekende partij zelf in haar offerte uitdrukkelijk 'NEEN' had ingevuld bij de conformiteitsvereiste van drie scharnierpunten voor opstaptreden — met de opmerking 'dit is een zinloze eis om bepaalde firma's te bevoordelen' — en de aanbestedende overheid haar offerte terecht als substantieel onregelmatig heeft verklaard, (2) de verzoekende partij er niet in slaagt aan te tonen dat het bestek op maat van de zittende inschrijver is geschreven, nu zij zelf voor het merendeel van de technische vereisten 'conform' had kunnen aanbieden en de driescharniereneis voortkwam uit concrete operationele ervaringen van de brandweer, (3) de looptijd van zes jaar voor de raamovereenkomst afdoende was gemotiveerd in de toelichtingsnota aan de Inspectie van Financiën — met verwijzing naar de hoge investeringskosten voor prototypebouw en de productietermijn van anderhalf tot twee jaar — en die motivering niet in het bestek zelf hoefde te staan, en (4) het middel inzake machtsafwending faalt bij gebrek aan ernstige en met elkaar overeenstemmende aanwijzingen.
Zusterarrest autopompen 4x2: bewust niet-conform inschrijven bij essentiële eis leidt onvermijdelijk tot substantiële onregelmatigheid
In dit zusterarrest van arrest 264.262 — met dezelfde partijen, dezelfde opdracht maar voor perceel 1 (autopompen 4x2) — verwerpt de Raad van State het beroep tot nietigverklaring op identieke gronden: de inschrijver die zelf uitdrukkelijk 'niet conform' invulde bij de essentiële eis van drie scharnierpunten voor opstaptreden, met de opmerking dat dit 'een zinloze eis is om bepaalde firma's te bevoordelen', kan achteraf niet beweren dat zij wél had kunnen voldoen, en het bestek is niet op maat van de zittende inschrijver geschreven nu de betwiste eis voortkwam uit concrete operationele ervaringen van de brandweer.
De beoordelingsmethode voor gunningscriteria hoeft niet vooraf te worden bekendgemaakt — en een beschrijvende beoordelingsschaal met vijf niveaus is niet onregelmatig
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de gunning van een overheidsopdracht voor werken (renovatie industrieel gebouw en aanleg bedrijvenpark), omdat (1) de beoordelingsmethode — een beschrijvende vijfpuntenschaal — niet vooraf in de opdrachtdocumenten hoefde te worden aangekondigd, mits zij coherent is, de gunningscriteria niet denatureert en geen discriminerend effect heeft (bevestiging van het TNS Dimarso-arrest), (2) de aanbestedende overheid de planningen van de inschrijvers mocht corrigeren om de vergelijkbaarheid te waarborgen door de startdatum te verschuiven naar het moment waarop daadwerkelijk op de werf wordt gewerkt, (3) het aspect 'organisatie' — waaronder het beheer van hinder in een stedelijke omgeving — duidelijk in het bestek was aangekondigd als beoordelingselement, en de inschrijver dit in haar offerte niet had behandeld, en (4) de aanbestedende overheid niet verplicht was om de inschrijver te vragen haar offerte op dit punt aan te vullen — dat zou een substantiële verbetering zijn geweest die het gelijkheidsbeginsel zou schenden.
Bij een globale beoordeling van technische waarde mag de aanbestedende overheid de vastgestelde meer- en minwaarden cijfermatig vertalen naar een score — en na vier offerterondes mag zij een voorkeursbieder aanwijzen zonder verder te onderhandelen
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de aanwijzing van CAF als voorkeursbieder voor de NMBS-raamovereenkomst voor nieuwe treinstellen (AM30), omdat (1) de beoordelingsmethode voor het criterium 'Technische waarde' — een beginscore van 18/36 met bijstelling van 0,1 punt per vastgestelde meer- of minwaarde — zich inpaste in de vooraf aangekondigde globale beoordeling en geen nieuw systeem was maar een nadere invulling na het eerdere schorsingsarrest, (2) de beoordelingselementen niet als subgunningscriteria waren gehanteerd omdat zij niet elk afzonderlijk waren gewogen, (3) de NMBS na vier offerterondes over twee jaar mocht beslissen een voorkeursbieder aan te wijzen in plaats van verder te onderhandelen, nu zij aannemelijk maakte dat verdere rondes ernstige negatieve gevolgen zouden hebben (70-100 miljoen euro OPEX-kosten, vertraging tot na 2030) terwijl het onzeker was of de offertes nog konden verbeteren, en (4) een nieuw middel dat pas op de dag van de terechtzitting schriftelijk werd ingediend, niet-ontvankelijk was wegens schending van de loyale procesvoering — ook al werd het aangebracht als middel van openbare orde.
Wanneer een inschrijver in zijn inventaris een streepje plaatst in plaats van een prijs, moet de formele motivering van de gunningsbeslissing het volledige onderzoek weerspiegelen — niet alleen het eindresultaat
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een dienstenopdracht voor de exploitatie van een radiodispatching, omdat de formele motivering van de gunningsbeslissing ontoereikend is: de aanbestedende overheid stelde dat de gekozen inschrijver een prijs van 0 euro had ingediend voor een transitiepost die zij als zittende operator niet nodig had, terwijl uit het administratief dossier bleek dat de inventaris slechts een streepje bevatte — een wezenlijk verschil dat de aanbestedende overheid voor de keuze plaatste tussen een materiële fout (artikel 34 KB 18/04/2017) en een substantiële onregelmatigheid (artikel 76 KB 18/04/2017), zonder dat dit onderzoek in de motivering tot uiting kwam.
Een beschrijvende evaluatie met globale quotering is een voorzienbare beoordelingsmethodiek voor kwalitatieve gunningscriteria — en wie zijn plan van aanpak baseert op een loutere overname van de standaardleidraad, kan niet verwachten dat de aanbestedende overheid daarin een meerwaarde leest
De Raad van State verwerpt het vernietigingsberoep tegen de gunning van een dienstenopdracht voor explosievenopsporing, omdat (1) het gebruik van een logaritmische prijsformule in plaats van de drieregel geen onwettigheid oplevert zolang een lagere prijs tot een hogere score leidt, (2) een beschrijvende evaluatie van kwalitatieve gunningscriteria met globale quotering een voorzienbare beoordelingsmethodiek is die niet vooraf aan de inschrijvers moet worden bekendgemaakt, en (3) de inschrijver die voor zijn plan van aanpak grotendeels de standaardleidraad overneemt — terwijl het bestek uitdrukkelijk vereist dat de inschrijver die leidraad overstijgt — niet aantoont dat de lage score op onjuiste feiten berust door louter de inhoud van zijn eigen offerte te herhalen.
De correlatie tussen de aangeboden prijs en de diepgang van het plan van aanpak mag worden betrokken bij de kwalitatieve beoordeling — en het niet-abnormaal bevinden van de prijs staat daar niet aan in de weg
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de gunning van een studieopdracht voor walstroom in een zeehaven, omdat (1) de aanbestedende overheid uit de correlatie tussen de lage prijs en het voorgestelde plan van aanpak mocht afleiden dat de studie met onvoldoende diepgang zou worden aangepakt — zonder daarmee de autonomie van de gunningscriteria te schenden — en (2) de vaststelling dat de prijs niet abnormaal is, niet tegenstrijdig is met de vaststelling dat het plan van aanpak onvoldoende diepgang vertoont: de prijs was normaal voor de voorgestelde aanpak, maar de aanpak zelf was ontoereikend.
Wanneer de aanbestedende overheid zelf vaststelt dat de totaalprijs van de gekozen inschrijver meer dan 43 procent onder het gemiddelde ligt en dit in het rood markeert, maar nalaat die totaalprijs nader te onderzoeken, is het prijsonderzoek onzorgvuldig
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van perceel 3 (Operations) van een raamovereenkomst voor gespecialiseerde ICT-diensten, omdat de aanbestedende overheid weliswaar een prijsonderzoek heeft gevoerd naar enkele specifieke posten, maar heeft nagelaten het mogelijks abnormaal karakter van de totaalprijs van de gekozen inschrijver te onderzoeken — ondanks een door haarzelf vastgestelde afwijking van -43,22 procent ten opzichte van het gemiddelde —, en omdat de beoordeling van de prijsverantwoording niet meer bevatte dan een samenvatting van de door de inschrijver aangedragen redenen zonder enig spoor van een eigen inhoudelijke toetsing aan de opdrachtvoorwaarden.
Een stereotiepe motivering dat de prijzen 'normaal en aanvaardbaar' zijn, zonder concreet rekening te houden met aangeboden kortingen van 30 tot 40 procent, getuigt niet van een daadwerkelijke prijsverificatie
De Raad van State vernietigt de gunning van een dienstenopdracht voor boominventarisatie, omdat uit het administratief dossier niet blijkt dat de aanbestedende overheid een concrete prijsverificatie heeft uitgevoerd die rekening houdt met de aangeboden kortingen van 30 tot 40 procent bij toewijzing van beide loten, en de motivering in de gunningsbeslissing niet meer is dan een stereotiepe standaardzin.
Een aanbestedende overheid kan niet op grond van artikel 85 van de Overheidsopdrachtenwet afzien van een opdracht die reeds in uitvoeringsfase is getreden — ook niet als de formele kennisgeving ontbreekt
De Raad van State schorst de beslissing van een gemeente om de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor periodieke controles in te trekken en af te zien van de opdracht, omdat de opdracht op het ogenblik van die beslissing reeds in een fase van uitvoering was getreden — er was een startbevel gegeven, er waren meer dan tachtig controles uitgevoerd — en artikel 85 van de Overheidsopdrachtenwet enkel kan worden ingeroepen tijdens de plaatsingsfase, niet nadat de uitvoering is begonnen.
Wanneer een inschrijver ook na een uitdrukkelijk verzoek om verduidelijking de gevraagde informatie niet verstrekt, is de aanbestedende overheid verhinderd de offerte te beoordelen en moet zij die nietig verklaren
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de onregelmatigverklaring van een offerte voor duurzame energieopslag, omdat de inschrijver — ook na een uitdrukkelijk verduidelijkingsverzoek — de vereiste informatie over standby- en koelingsverbruik niet verstrekte, waardoor de aanbestedende overheid de offerte niet kon aftoetsen aan het subgunningscriterium OPEX en verplicht was de offerte nietig te verklaren.
Wanneer een minimumvereiste softwareontwikkeling vergt in plaats van standaard beschikbaar te zijn, volstaan vage beloftes over toekomstige ontwikkeling niet om aan te tonen dat de offerte conform is
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de beslissing om een offerte voor een Resource Planning Tool als onregelmatig te weren, omdat twee minimumvereisten — het aanmaken van diensten/shifts vanuit boekingen en het definiëren van meerdere werkstelsels — softwareontwikkeling vergden in plaats van standaard beschikbaar te zijn, en de inschrijver geen concrete roadmap of financiële raming voorlegde om aan te tonen dat die ontwikkeling tijdig zou worden gerealiseerd.
Een kwalitatieve beoordeling waarbij dezelfde elementen uit een offerte bij meerdere gunningscriteria als min- of pluspunt worden meegenomen is niet onwettig, zolang de beoordeling telkens vanuit een ander kader en een andere invalshoek gebeurt
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor visuele en verbale branding van de Stad Brugge, omdat de verzoeker niet aannemelijk maakt dat het ontbreken van een vooraf bekendgemaakte beoordelingsmethodiek onwettig is wanneer de evaluatie op een voor de hand liggende manier besloten lag in de omschrijving van de gunningscriteria, en omdat het meenemen van dezelfde offerteaspecten bij meerdere gunningscriteria geen verboden dubbele beoordeling uitmaakt wanneer de beoordeling telkens vanuit een andere invalshoek gebeurt.
Adding up fee percentages as if they were euro amounts and then calling eight out of ten items 'negligible' — while each item accounts for 10% of the price criterion
The Council of State suspends the award of a framework contract for designers because the municipality of Evergem treated fee percentages as absolute amounts in its price investigation, and labelled eight of ten items as negligible while each represented a sub-award criterion worth 7 out of 70 points.
Staples missing from the maintenance price: raising the wrong argument loses your case
The Council of State rejects a printer supplier's challenge against the declaration of irregularity of its tender for a federal framework agreement, because the tenderer argued in its application that staples were indeed included in the offer — whereas the actual issue was that their cost was not included in the maintenance price — and the correct argument was only raised at the hearing, which was too late.
Setting the threshold at 2% and then ignoring it: the Council rebukes the Walloon Region
The Council of State suspends the award of a dam renovation study because the Walloon Region treated posts worth 0.57% and 0.76% of the tender as non-negligible, despite having defined non-negligible posts as those exceeding 2% of the total tender amount — a clear violation of its own rules.
Stating that 'procurement rules were violated' and referring to attached emails does not constitute a legal argument — not even in urgent proceedings
The Council of State rejects an application for suspension of an award for print and lettering work because the petition contained no legal argument: it merely stated 'violation of procurement rules' and referred to attached email correspondence.
AV infrastructure for training centre PLOT: suspicions about technical compliance are not enough without proof
The Council of State rejects an AV supplier's challenge against the award of a contract for audiovisual infrastructure in a provincial training building, finding that an alleged notification defect does not affect the award decision's legality, the technical assessment motivation is adequate, and challenging the certification criterion is inadmissible due to lack of interest given a score difference of only 1.5 out of 100.
Night medical mail delivery Liège: price verification by hospital purchasing central sufficiently motivated despite succinct formulation
The Council of State rejects a challenge against the award of a contract for night medical mail delivery in the province of Liège, because the contracting authority — acting as purchasing central for four hospitals — conducted a genuine and concrete price verification under Article 36 of the Placement Royal Decree, and the decision's motivation, though succinct and allusive due to confidentiality requirements, sufficiently demonstrates that the chosen tenderer's prices are not abnormal.
Sewer inspection Kortrijk: suspension due to unjustified exclusion of tenderer proposing the same subcontractor as another tenderer
The Council of State suspends the non-selection of a tenderer for a sewer cleaning and inspection contract in Kortrijk, because no legal provision or specification prohibits a subcontractor from offering its services to multiple tenderers — the prohibition on multiple tenders (Article 54(2) of the Placement Royal Decree) applies to the tenderers themselves, not their subcontractors, even when the subcontracted work constitutes the core element of the contract.
Redeveloping a €16.5M square at zero public cost: if you don't include everything in the financial plan, you're out
The Council of State rejects a developer's challenge against the declaration of irregularity of its tender for a major public square redevelopment, finding that omitting certain facilities from the financial plan — while including them in descriptive notes — constitutes a substantive irregularity that prevents comparison with other tenders, and the contracting authority was not obliged to allow regularisation.
Event expert culture EventFlanders: references as assessment element within quality award criterion and score reduction after interview
The Council of State rejects a challenge against the award of a consultancy contract for a culture event expert at EventFlanders, because the specifications treat references not as an independent sub-criterion but as an assessment element for evaluating the proposed individual's experience, and because the authority was not required to further assess the applicant's references after the interview revealed the proposed expert could not clarify his specific role in those references.
Hockey field conversion Evere: comment in offer about connecting to existing pipes does not render offer irregular when unit price covers full replacement
The Council of State rejects a challenge against the award of works for converting a hockey field in Evere, because the chosen tenderer's comment that sprinkler cannons would be connected to existing pipes does not render the offer substantially irregular — the unit price is comparable to other tenderers and covers full replacement, and the final execution method will be decided during works after inspection of the existing system.
DIFTAR software IVIO: suspension due to invalid declaration of substantial irregularity of offer with zero prices for required options
The Council of State suspends the award of a public contract for DIFTAR software because the declaration of substantial irregularity of the applicant's offer — which quoted zero prices for five required options — is not properly motivated: the offer does contain a description of the options, the zero price constitutes a valid price commitment, and the comparability of offers is not affected since the total price is the sole award criterion.
Bailiff services for forced debt recovery: not a public contract, but still a competitive process
The Council of State rejects a bailiff firm's challenge against the award of a contract for forced recovery of municipal debts, finding that such bailiff services — as exercise of public authority — are excluded from the Public Procurement Act under article 28 §1, 4°, e), meaning the expedited procedures of the Remedies Act are unavailable and the applicant failed to prove urgency.
Eight grounds over 104 pages in an extreme-urgency petition? The Council of State reads that as proof the case isn't serious
The Belgian Council of State rejects Etude Bordet's extreme-urgency suspension against an SWDE water-collections contract awarded to Venturis, noting explicitly that an extreme-urgency petition setting out eight grounds over more than a hundred pages is hardly compatible with the 'apparent illegality' such a suspension requires.
Road maintenance Baelen: price justification based on subcontractor offer for different quantities is manifestly unreasonable
The Council of State annuls the award of a road maintenance framework agreement because the contracting authority could not accept the winning tenderer's price justification for three bituminous surface treatment items — a mere reference to a subcontractor's offer without detailed substantiation is insufficient, and the subcontractor calculated prices based on 1,000 m² while the bill of quantities specified 100 m², meaning the unit prices for the bill quantities were not justified.
Catering services for crematoria: eighteen-month-old insurance certificate does not qualify as 'valid current certificate' — tenderer bears responsibility
The Council of State rejects a catering company's challenge against its non-selection for a framework agreement for crematorium catering services, because an insurance certificate dating from eighteen months before the submission deadline is not a valid current certificate — the contracting authority is not obliged to request clarification on deficiencies resulting from the tenderer's own negligence, and submitting recent certificates in judicial proceedings is incompatible with equal treatment.
Selection criterion in specifications sharpening the contract notice: non-selection based on unannounced minimum requirement suspended
The Council of State suspends the non-selection of a signage and exhibition material supplier by VDAB, because the requirement that references relate to exhibitions with at least 70 stands was only included in the specifications and not in the mandatory contract notice — specifications may repeat but not tighten selection criteria beyond the contract notice.
Een diepgaand algemeen prijsonderzoek met gedetailleerde prijstoelichtingen en stavingsstukken kan volstaan om een aanzienlijk lagere prijs als normaal te aanvaarden — zonder dat de overheid verplicht is tot een formeel bijzonder prijsonderzoek over te gaan
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de gunning van een opdracht voor het drukken en couverteren van transactioneel drukwerk voor de FOD Financiën, omdat de aanbestedende overheid — na intrekking van een eerder geschorste gunningsbeslissing — een nieuw en diepgaand algemeen prijsonderzoek heeft gevoerd waarin de gekozen inschrijver zijn aanzienlijk lagere totaal- en eenheidsprijzen gedetailleerd en cijfermatig heeft verantwoord met stavingsstukken, zodat de overheid rechtmatig kon besluiten dat de prijzen normaal waren zonder tot een formeel bijzonder prijsonderzoek over te gaan.
Framework agreement for public cloud Copernicus data: competitive advantage from prior involvement in earth observation programme is legitimate
The Council of State rejects a cloud service provider's challenge against the award of an IaaS framework agreement for Copernicus earth observation data, finding that the winning tenderer's competitive advantage — having the data already available on its cloud through involvement in the Copernicus programme — is legitimate, the price investigation for intellectual services with wide price margins was diligent, and the lower technical quality score was attributable to the applicant's own failure to provide concrete information on scalability and data capacity.
Een kleine schapenhouder die zijn lage prijs verantwoordt met zijn unieke bedrijfsmodel maar nalaat dat cijfermatig te staven, draagt het risico van de ontoereikende bewijsvoering — en de overheid hoeft haar eigen marktgegevens niet te delen als die in het algemeen prijsonderzoek zijn gebruikt
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de gunning van een opdracht voor schapenbegrazing op dijken langs de Zeeschelde, omdat de aanbestedende overheid binnen de grenzen van een zorgvuldige beoordeling is gebleven door de offerte substantieel onregelmatig te verklaren wegens een onvoldoende onderbouwde prijsverantwoording — en omdat de marktgegevens van andere opdrachten als referentiekader in het algemeen prijsonderzoek zijn gebruikt en niet als externe inlichtingen in het bijzonder prijsonderzoek, zodat de overheid die niet aan de inschrijver hoefde voor te leggen.
Een prijsverantwoording die uitgaat van een niet-bestekconforme uitvoering kan niet worden aanvaard — en de loutere mededeling van de prijs van een onderaannemer neemt de schijn van abnormaliteit niet weg
De Raad van State vernietigt de gunning van werken voor de nieuwbouw van een sportgebouw in Wichelen, omdat de aanbestedende overheid de prijsverantwoording van de eerste gerangschikte inschrijver voor gevelpanelen in architectonisch beton heeft aanvaard terwijl die verantwoording was gebaseerd op zelfproductie — wat niet bestekconform was aangezien het bestek prefabricatie door een Febelarch-lid in onderaanneming voorschreef — en de prijsverantwoording van de tweede gerangschikte inschrijver voor aluminium schrijnwerk louter bestond uit de prijs van een onderaannemer vermeerderd met een winstmarge, zonder concrete en objectieve verklarende factoren.
Een beschrijvende opsomming van de inhoud van offertes is geen evaluatie — de motivering moet uitleggen waarom de ene offerte beter scoort dan de andere
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor fietsleasing voor het personeel van Vivalia, omdat het gunningsverslag zich voor het criterium dienst na verkoop beperkte tot een beschrijvende opsomming van wat elke offerte bevatte, zonder te evalueren waarom de ene offerte beter scoorde dan de andere — terwijl de offerte van de verzoeker op bepaalde punten ruimere diensten aanbood dan die van de gekozen inschrijver.
Beoordelingselementen bij een gunningscriterium zijn geen subgunningscriteria — ze vragen geen afzonderlijke motivering per onderdeel, en de motivering moet in haar geheel worden gelezen
De Raad van State verwerpt — tegen het andersluidend advies van de auditeur in — de vordering tegen de gunning van scenografische werken voor het MAP-Mercator museum in Sint-Niklaas, omdat de beoordelingselementen bij het kwaliteitscriterium (esthetiek, technieken, draagkracht, opbouw, duurzaamheid) geen subgunningscriteria zijn die elk een afzonderlijke motivering of quotering vereisen, het gebruik van het woord 'goed' in de motivering een globale score van 'zeer goed' niet uitsluit, en een vintage stijl die uit de bijgevoegde ontwerpschetsen kon worden afgeleid een legitiem referentiekader voor de esthetische beoordeling vormde.
Wie een prijsverantwoording voor de totaalprijs aanvaardt, moet de opgegeven elementen concreet bespreken en evalueren — niet louter opsommen en besluiten dat de prijs niet abnormaal is
De Raad van State vernietigt via de versnelde rechtspleging de gunning van werken voor de renovatie van de renbaan en de historische omheining van de renbaan van Bosvoorde, omdat de aanbestedende overheid de prijsverantwoording van de gekozen inschrijver aanvaardde door de opgegeven elementen — ervaring, investeringen, eerdere werken — louter op te sommen zonder ze concreet te evalueren, terwijl de verantwoording geen enkele cijfermatige onderbouwing bevatte en de aangekondigde berekeningen niet waren bijgevoegd.
Wie bij het prijsonderzoek steunt op eigen gegevens die niet van de inschrijver komen, moet die gegevens eerst aan de inschrijver voorleggen — en ze controleerbaar motiveren in het gunningsverslag
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor groenbeheerwerken langs kanalen en waterlopen, omdat de aanbestedende overheid de offerte van de verzoeker onregelmatig verklaarde op basis van eigen houtopbrengstcijfers uit een eerdere opdracht en een extern advies — zonder die gegevens eerst aan de inschrijver voor te leggen zodat hij erop kon reageren, en zonder in het gunningsverslag de bron of context van die cijfers te vermelden.
Winning a suspension ruling doesn't guarantee you'll get the contract — the authority can terminate the entire procedure
The Council of State rejects an appeal against the termination of a procurement procedure for a Medical First Responder study, because a prior suspension ruling that found the selection criterion at least ambiguous is in itself a sufficient ground to terminate and redraft the tender specifications.
Not examining the cheapest tender while you budgeted for 25% indexation — that's not price verification
The Council of State annuls the award of an auditor contract by the Walloon agency AViQ because the contracting authority extensively analyzed the more expensive tenders but said nothing about the remarkably low price of the winner — which was at the same level as the previous contract, despite the estimate including 25% indexation.
Inadequate motivation of sub-criteria is insufficient when the points gap is too large to affect the outcome
The Council of State rejects an IT training company's challenge against the award of a framework agreement for IT training services (game design, motion design, compositing VFX), holding that while some sub-criteria were inadequately motivated, the affected points were too few to bridge the gap with the threshold or the first-ranked tenderer, the criticism of trainer qualifications was unsubstantiated, and inviting only one tenderer for a price-only BAFO did not violate the equality principle since the applicant already had the lowest price.
Een aanbestedende overheid mag de erkenning herklassificeren naar de subcategorie die financieel het zwaarst doorweegt — en wie dat pas in de procedure betwist na eerst inhoudelijk te hebben geargumenteerd, verliest zijn recht om de formele motivering aan te vechten
De Raad van State verwerpt het vernietigingsberoep tegen de gunning van de renovatie van de Regenboogbrug te Waregem, omdat de aanbestedende overheid de erkenningsvereiste terecht mocht herklassificeren van de categorieën D, F en G naar subcategorie F2 op basis van het financiële zwaartepunt van de staalconstructiewerken, en omdat de verzoeker haar grief over de gebrekkige formele motivering impliciet had prijsgegeven door in latere procedurestukken uitsluitend inhoudelijk over de herklassificatie te argumenteren.
Een louter beschrijvende beoordeling van offertes volstaat niet — de motivering moet voor elk beoordelingselement uit het bestek aangeven of en waarom een offerte beter of minder goed scoort
De Raad van State schorst voor de tweede maal de gunning van een architectuuropdracht voor 45 studentenwoningen in Doornik, omdat het nieuwe gunningsverslag — opgesteld na een eerste schorsingsarrest wegens motiveringsgebreken — opnieuw faalde in de formele motivering: de beoordeling van de offertes was louter beschrijvend zonder aan te geven of elementen positief of negatief werden gewaardeerd, gebruikte niet dezelfde beoordelingselementen voor elke offerte, en behandelde niet alle in het bestek aangekondigde beoordelingselementen voor het tweede criterium.
Prijsverificatie op basis van een 'gelijkaardige eerdere opdracht' vereist een daadwerkelijke en onderbouwde vergelijking — een referentie die 28 keer groter is zonder volumecorrectie volstaat niet
De Raad van State schorst voor de derde maal de gunning van een opdracht voor medische postbedeling door SC HUMANI, omdat de prijsverificatie steunde op een zogenaamd gelijkaardige opdracht van de intercommunale ISPPC uit 2018 die 28 keer groter was, zonder enige herberekening om het prijsverschil te corrigeren voor de verschillende volumes — waardoor een reconstructie juist een prijs opleverde die 44 procent hoger lag dan de aanvaarde offerte — en zonder de beweerde marktontwikkeling sinds 2018 te staven.
Een laconieke vaststelling dat uitvoering 'materieel onmogelijk' is, volstaat niet als motivering voor de onregelmatigheid van een offerte
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een opdracht voor groenonderhoud door de gemeente Paliseul, omdat de onregelmatigverklaring van de offerte van de laagste inschrijver steunde op één enkele laconieke zin — dat het 'materieel onmogelijk' was voor één persoon om het werk binnen de geschatte uren uit te voeren — zonder enige onderbouwing door middel van vergelijkingen met andere offertes, eigen ervaringscijfers of referentieopdrachten, en een aanvullend argument dat pas voor het eerst in de procedure voor de Raad van State werd aangevoerd het motiveringsgebrek niet achteraf kon herstellen.
Loutere verwijzing naar de offerte van een onderaannemer plus overhead is geen afdoende prijsverantwoording — de inschrijver moet de uitvoeringsmethode en het rendement toelichten
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de onregelmatigverklaring van de offerte van de tijdelijke maatschap SOCOGETRA-BESIX voor de grondige renovatie van het Viaduc Villette van de metro van Charleroi, omdat de prijsverantwoording voor post 289 (levering Californisch wissel) louter bestond uit de offerte van een onder-onderaannemer vermeerderd met algemene kosten, zonder enige toelichting bij de uitvoeringsmethode of het rendement — terwijl het bestek een gedetailleerde fabricagebeschrijving bevatte en de eenheidsprijs aanzienlijk lager lag dan die van de andere inschrijvers.
Dubbelzinnige motivering bij prijsonderzoek volstaat niet — de inschrijver moet kunnen begrijpen of zijn verantwoording als niet-ontvankelijk of als ongegrond is afgewezen
De Raad van State schorst de onregelmatigverklaring van de offerte van SA A2 voor wegenwerken in de gemeente Boussu, omdat de motivering dubbelzinnig was op twee punten: enerzijds bleek niet of de prijsverantwoording als niet-ontvankelijk dan wel als inhoudelijk ongegrond was beoordeeld, anderzijds was niet vast te stellen of de eigenlijke gronden voor de uitsluiting die waren uit de deels gecensureerde versie van het verslag van nazicht of die uit de gunningsbeslissing zelf — en vertrouwelijkheid rechtvaardigt weliswaar een beknopte motivering, maar geen buitensporig laconieke.
Stopzetting wegens onduidelijkheid in het bestek is gerechtvaardigd als die onduidelijkheid tot een daadwerkelijk verschillende prijszetting heeft geleid — en de vermelding van totaalprijzen in de stopzettingsbeslissing schendt niet automatisch de mededinging
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tegen de stopzetting van een openbare procedure voor spoorvernieuwingswerken op de lijn L60 Jette-Dendermonde, omdat een onduidelijkheid in het bestek over de eenheid van post 7.9.1 — per uur per man of per uur per ploeg van negen arbeiders — daadwerkelijk tot een verschillende prijszetting bij de drie inschrijvers had geleid waardoor een correcte vergelijking niet meer mogelijk was, en de vermelding van de totale offerteprijzen in de stopzettingsbeslissing de mededinging bij de heraanbesteding niet schendt nu die bedragen door het verschil in prijszetting hoe dan ook een vertekend beeld geven.
Een goedgekeurd RSZ-afbetalingsplan volstaat als bewijs van regularisatie — maar de aanbestedende overheid moet de regularisatiekans ook uitdrukkelijk bieden
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een opdracht voor het onderhoud van poorten aan de Faculteit Diergeneeskunde van de Universiteit Gent omdat de aanbestedende overheid een inschrijver met een RSZ-schuld van meer dan 10.000 euro enkel heeft bevraagd over de uitzondering van artikel 68, paragraaf 1, eerste lid, 2° (tegenvorderingen op een overheid) maar hem nooit uitdrukkelijk de regularisatiekans heeft geboden die het derde lid van diezelfde bepaling voorschrijft — en omdat een goedgekeurd afbetalingsplan bij de RSZ op zich volstaat als bewijs van regularisatie, zonder dat de eerste aflossing al binnen vijf werkdagen moet zijn betaald.
Verwijzing naar kortingspercentages uit eerdere opdrachten zonder controle op hun normaliteit is geen deugdelijk prijsonderzoek
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een F.A.S.T.-opdracht voor het takelen en afvoeren van voertuigen op de E313 Oost omdat de aanbestedende overheid haar conclusie dat een kortingspercentage van 15 procent op de vaste tarieven niet abnormaal was, enkel steunde op het gegeven dat in eerdere F.A.S.T.-opdrachten in Vlaams-Brabant en West-Vlaanderen kortingen van 25 en 35 procent waren aangeboden — zonder na te gaan of die hogere kortingen zelf op hun normaliteit waren gecontroleerd — en op de dermate algemene vaststelling dat de offerte 'goed was voorbereid', wat evident geen deugdelijk motief kan vormen.
A 'low-value contract'? Then your cost estimate must be on paper before you launch — otherwise the award collapses like a house of cards
Bpost awarded a contract for LED-light beanies without publication as a 'low-value contract', but could produce no prior value estimate in the administrative file — the Council of State definitively annuls the award through the fast-track procedure.
Referentieprojecten 'van vergelijkbare omvang' zijn een kwantitatieve vereiste die je niet kunt weginterpreteren via de minimumvereisten
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van de interieurrestauratie van een beschermd monument omdat de aanbestedende overheid een inschrijver selecteerde op basis van referentieprojecten waarvan slechts één een vergelijkbare financiële omvang had als de opdracht — terwijl het bestek uitdrukkelijk drie referentieprojecten 'van vergelijkbare omvang' vereiste en vier van de vijf voorgelegde referenties ver onder de waarde van de opdracht lagen.
Niet-ondertekende en ongedateerde vergelijkingstabellen bewijzen geen effectieve prijsverificatie — zeker niet bij aanzienlijke prijsverschillen
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van twee percelen van een opdracht voor groenonderhoud omdat noch de gunningsbeslissing noch het analyseverslag enige melding maakte van een prijsverificatie, en de niet-ondertekende, ongedateerde vergelijkingstabellen met handgeschreven notities die de aanbestedende overheid als bewijs van verificatie aanvoerde, prima facie onvoldoende waren om de realiteit en effectiviteit van de prijsverificatie aan te tonen — zeker gelet op de aanzienlijke prijsverschillen tussen de offertes.
Award of €196,000 contract by the Director-General annulled — no delegation for decisions above €139,000
The Council of State annuls the Agence du Numérique's award of the 'Digital Commerce 2021' contract to SNI asbl (€196,000 incl. VAT) on a ground raised by the auditor ex officio: the Director-General was not competent to award a contract above €139,000 excl. VAT, and the Board of Directors had never taken the decision.
Prijsverificatie uit een eerste procedure volstaat niet als de prijzen in de tweede procedure fundamenteel anders zijn
De Raad van State vernietigt de gunning van wegenwerken aan een inschrijver wiens offerte in een eerste openbare procedure als abnormaal was verworpen, omdat de aanbestedende overheid in de daaropvolgende mededingingsprocedure met onderhandeling geen nieuwe prijsverificatie uitvoerde en zich beperkte tot een verwijzing naar de prijsanalyse van de eerste procedure — terwijl de eenheidsprijzen fundamenteel verschilden en de conclusie diametraal tegenovergesteld was.
Prijsverificatie moet effectief en verifieerbaar zijn — vooral bij grote prijsverschillen tussen offertes
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor modulaire stroomonderbrekers omdat de effectiviteit van de prijsverificatie niet afdoende kon worden vastgesteld — de nota in het administratief dossier bevatte onbewezen beweringen over marktpositionering, een onvolledige vergelijking met een federaal raamcontract en een onverklaarde kwalificatie van een inschrijver als producent, terwijl de prijsverschillen tussen de offertes aanzienlijk waren.
Prijsverificatie mag zich niet beperken tot de posten die de aanbestedende overheid vooraf als niet-verwaarloosbaar heeft bestempeld — en de motivering moet meer doen dan de rechtvaardigingen van de inschrijver herhalen
De Raad van State vernietigt de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor dynamische parkeergeleidingsborden omdat de aanbestedende overheid de prijsverificatie beperkte tot tien posten die zij vooraf als niet-verwaarloosbaar beschouwde, terwijl andere posten met enorme prijsafwijkingen duidelijk niet verwaarloosbaar waren, en de motivering zich beperkte tot het herhalen van de rechtvaardigingen van de inschrijver zonder te verantwoorden waarom initieel abnormaal lijkende prijzen toch aanvaardbaar waren — de Raad kent daarnaast een herstelvergoeding van 68.181,82 euro toe op basis van 33 procent verlies van kans.
Beoordelingsmethode NMBS-treincontract geschorst: verband tussen kwalitatieve labels en punten is onbegrijpelijk
De Raad van State schorst de aanwijzing van CAF als preferentiële inschrijver voor het AM30-raamakkoord van de NMBS (tot 4,66 miljard euro voor elektrische treinstellen), omdat de beoordelingsmethode voor het criterium 'technische waarde' niet toeliet te begrijpen hoe de generieke kwalitatieve labels en de vastgestelde meer- en minwaarden zich vertaalden in de toegekende puntenscores.
Kwaliteitsdoelstellingen per stuk beoordelen en scoren is geen ongeoorloofd gebruik van subgunningscriteria
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tegen de gunning van een raamovereenkomst voor warme drankautomaten omdat het systematisch beoordelen en scoren van elk van de in het bestek aangekondigde kwaliteitsdoelstellingen geen ongeoorloofde subgunningscriteria creëert, maar slechts de aangekondigde beoordelingsmethodiek van plus- en minpunten toepast.
Een minimumeis als 'te ontwikkelen' aanbieden is geen onregelmatigheid als het bestek die antwoordmogelijkheid voorziet
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tegen de gunning van een SaaS-opdracht omdat het bestek uitdrukkelijk toeliet dat inschrijvers minimumeisen als 'te ontwikkelen' aanboden — mits concrete beschrijving van de manier en het tijdsbestek — en omdat de aanbestedende overheid die aanpak ook bij de beoordeling op haar inhoudelijke merites mocht waarderen.
Een gunningsbeslissing kan ook na sluiting van de opdracht worden ingetrokken als de offerte substantieel onregelmatig was
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tegen de intrekking van een gunningsbeslissing en de heraanwijzing aan een andere inschrijver, omdat de niet-ondertekende indieningsrapporten bij twee latere aanvullingen van de offerte tot de nietigheid van die aanvullingen leidden — waardoor essentiële veiligheidsdocumenten als niet-ingediend golden en de offerte substantieel onregelmatig was.
Het gunningsverslag pas na de gunningsbeslissing meedelen is een motiveringsgebrek
De Raad van State schorst een gunningsbeslissing omdat de aanbestedende overheid het gunningsverslag — waarop de motivering volledig steunde — niet gelijktijdig met de beslissing heeft meegedeeld aan de niet-gekozen inschrijvers.
Zusterbedrijven die elk op een ander perceel inschrijven met identieke prijzen, personeel en lay-out: entente bewezen
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tegen de wering van een offerte wegens mededingingsverstorende entente, omdat twee zusterondernemingen uit dezelfde groep hun offertes op verschillende percelen aantoonbaar hadden gecoördineerd — met identieke lay-out, dezelfde contactpersoon, 23 identieke eenheidsprijzen, dezelfde onderaannemers en identieke rekenfouten.
Een algemeen voorbehoud van het studiebureau verplicht de aanbestedende overheid niet tot bijkomende prijsgaranties
De Raad van State verwerpt het beroep tegen de gunning van de bouw van een brandtoren omdat het advies van het studiebureau om een schriftelijke prijsgarantie te vragen een algemeen voorbehoud was — geen verplichte stap — en omdat de vermeende discrepantie tussen de verantwoording van eenheidsprijzen en de totaalprijs niet werd aangetoond.
Punten aftrekken voor informatie die het bestek niet vroeg, is een onangekondigd subcriterium
De Raad van State vernietigt de gunning van HVAC-werken aan een zwembad omdat de aanbestedende overheid vijf punten aftrok voor het ontbreken van veiligheidsinformatie in de methodologische nota, terwijl het bestek die informatie nergens als vereiste vermeldde.
Zeggen dat je de prijsverantwoording 'aanvaardt' is geen motivering
De Raad van State schorst een gunningsbeslissing omdat de aanbestedende overheid bij het prijsonderzoek enkel vermeldde dat de verantwoording 'aanvaard kan worden', zonder enige inhoudelijke analyse waaruit blijkt waarom de prijs niet abnormaal laag is.
Een opdrachtgever mag stoppen en herbeginnen, ook als het bestek op zich niet onwettig was
De Raad van State verwerpt een vernietigingsberoep tegen de beslissing van SOFICO om een raamovereenkomst voor wegborstel- en zuigdiensten niet te gunnen en opnieuw te lanceren, omdat de verwijzing naar één specifiek paritair comité in het bestek de mededinging kon beperken — ook al was de tekst op zich duidelijk.
Stel je beoordelingsmethode vast vóór de opening van de offertes — en pas ze correct toe
De Raad van State schorst een gunningsbeslissing voor meet- en detectietoestellen omdat de beoordelingsmethode voor het criterium 'functionele waarde' niet vooraf was vastgesteld en bovendien rekenkundig inconsistent was toegepast, waardoor de inschrijver de puntentoekenning niet kon controleren.
Als de vereiste erkenning niet in het bestek staat, kun je een inschrijver niet weren omdat hij ze niet heeft
De Raad van State schorst een gunningsbeslissing omdat de opdrachtgever een inschrijver uitsloot wegens het ontbreken van een erkenning in categorie D, terwijl die vereiste niet was opgenomen in de opdrachtdocumenten die de inschrijvers konden raadplegen op e-Procurement.
Een verbeteringsvoorstel bij gezamenlijke gunning indienen terwijl het bestek dat verbiedt? Dan draag je zelf de gevolgen
De Raad van State verwerpt een schorsingsberoep tegen de gunning van een opdracht voor lichte woningen, omdat de inschrijver in haar offerte een ongeoorloofd verbeteringsvoorstel bij gezamenlijke toewijzing van beide percelen had opgenomen en de opdrachtgever dat terecht niet in rekening had gebracht.
Technische fiches aanleveren na het indienen? Teken dan ook het nieuwe depotrapport
De Raad van State verwerpt een schorsingsberoep omdat de inschrijver die op verzoek van de opdrachtgever aanvullende technische fiches indiende via e-Procurement, het bijhorende depotrapport niet had ondertekend met een gekwalificeerde elektronische handtekening — en dat is een substantiële onregelmatigheid.
Nieuwe regelgeving tijdens de procedure? Dan mag de opdrachtgever stoppen
De Raad van State verwerpt een schorsingsberoep tegen de niet-gunning van een opdracht voor gerechtsdeurwaardersdiensten, omdat een ingrijpende hervorming van de deurwaarderstarieven tijdens de procedure een gegronde reden was om te stoppen en opnieuw te beginnen met een actueel bestek.
Selectiecriteria controleren is geen formaliteit die je mag overslaan
De Raad van State schorst de gunning van een architectuuropdracht omdat de opdrachtgever nergens in het dossier aantoonde dat hij had geverifieerd of het winnende team daadwerkelijk over een 'ingenieur in speciale technieken' beschikte, terwijl het bestek dat uitdrukkelijk eiste.
Je prijzen verantwoorden is een examen met één kans
De Raad van State verwerpt een schorsingsberoep tegen de uitsluiting van een inschrijver wegens abnormaal lage prijzen, omdat die bij zijn prijsverantwoording enkel een zelfgemaakt tabelletje indiende zonder enig bewijsstuk — en de opdrachtgever niet verplicht is om daar een tweede keer naar te vragen.
Een lagere prijs dan die van jou is niet automatisch een abnormale prijs
De Raad van State verwerpt een vordering tot nietigverklaring van een gunning voor incassodiensten omdat de verliezer niet aantoonde dat de opdrachtgever een kennelijke beoordelingsfout maakte bij het prijsonderzoek of bij de beoordeling van de kwalitatieve gunningscriteria.
Een fout in een Excel-formule is niet automatisch een 'rekenkundige vergissing'
De Raad van State schorst een gunning omdat de opdrachtgever fouten in Excel-formules van de winnaar corrigeerde als 'rekenkundige vergissingen', terwijl niet vaststond dat het om loutere telfouten ging en niet om fouten die de offerte onregelmatig maakten.
Je moederbedrijf is groot genoeg? Bewijs dan dat het zich ook engageert
Een scheepsbouwer die de financiële draagkracht van zijn moederbedrijf inriep zonder een formeel engagement voor te leggen dat die capaciteit ook daadwerkelijk ter beschikking zou staan, werd terecht niet geselecteerd — ook al behoort de dochter tot dezelfde groep.
A mere price confirmation does not constitute an adequate price investigation when the tender price is significantly lower
The Council of State suspends the award of a transactional printing contract because the contracting authority failed to conduct an adequate general price investigation on the significantly lower total price of the chosen tenderer, and limited itself to a meaningless price confirmation for a remarkably low unit price instead of initiating a special investigation into abnormal prices.
Annulment of non-selection for restoration works 'Salon Cousin' Royal Museums – selection requirement of at least two references specifically for Victor Horta buildings disproportionate, art-nouveau metalwork expertise not unique to Horta, unnecessarily restrictive of competition
The Council of State annulled the decision of the Royal Museums of Art and History not to select BV REMMEN for lot 1 of the restoration of the 'Salon Cousin', because the selection requirement of at least two references for restoration works on buildings specifically designed by Victor Horta was disproportionate — the required expertise in original art-nouveau metalworking and assembly techniques is not unique to Horta buildings, and the very limited number of eligible buildings unnecessarily restricted competition.
Suspension of award of insurance brokerage pooling contract for Flemish government entities – statement of reasons for price investigation is mere boilerplate: estimate redacted, justification elements not concretely assessed, reasons communicated ex post via observations and intervention request
The Council of State suspended the award by the Flemish Community of an insurance brokerage pooling contract for Flemish government entities to NV A., because the first limb of the single ground was serious: the statement of reasons for the price investigation in the award report was mere boilerplate — the estimate was redacted, the three justification elements from the price justification were adopted without concrete assessment, and the redaction of essential reasons in the version communicated to the applicant violated the formal statement of reasons obligation.
Suspension of fire station renovation award due to inadequate price justification examination — municipality failed to examine price justification in its entirety and rejected offer on factually incorrect grounds
The Council of State suspended the award of works for the renovation and extension of the fire station and municipal depot in Sint-Gillis-Waas, finding that the municipality had not examined the tenderer's price justification with the required diligence and had declared the offer irregular on grounds lacking factual and legal basis.
Awarded lot 1? It can still evaporate — Article 85 lets the authority start over.
The Council of State dismisses the extreme-urgency challenge of the original winner against the retraction and termination of the procedure: Article 85 of the Public Procurement Act gives the contracting authority wide discretion to retract its award decision and restart the procedure, even without proving any irregularity in the earlier phases.
A 37% discount 'verified' with one boilerplate sentence? That is not a price review.
The Council of State suspends an award because the Walloon Region failed to concretely verify the 30-40% discount on the combined bid of the winner — the boilerplate line 'after verification, the prices are normal and acceptable' is dismissed as a stock phrase.
From a +96,000 euro estimate to a -8,000 euro bid: 'market evolution' is not enough as price justification
IDELUX awarded the valorisation of CUA compost to Valodirect at a negative price of -8,000 euros, although IDELUX itself had estimated the contract at +96,000 euros — the Council of State suspended because the reasoning was limited to general observations about an evolving market, without concretely explaining how the winning bidder could actually operate profitably at those specific volumes.
Rejection of challenge to portfolio assessment in stepped system — motivation concrete enough, no right to 'reasons for the reasons'
The Council of State rejects a graphic designer's challenge to their exclusion from the City of Antwerp's freelance partner pool, finding that the qualitative portfolio assessment (35% against a 65% threshold) was sufficiently concretely motivated and that merely contradicting the assessment did not rebut the presumption of legality.
Optimistic soil reuse (60%) without screening or soil improvement costs does not justify abnormally low earthworks prices
The Council of State rejects the challenge against the exclusion of a tender for sewer and road works because the price justification for the total price and eleven earthworks items was rightly rejected: the tenderer assumed an insufficiently substantiated 60% soil reuse rate without costs for screening or soil improvement.
A price of €0 is always suspicious, €1 usually isn't — and that difference justifies different investigations
The Council of State rejects the extreme urgency suspension: the fact that Bruxelles-Propreté excluded bailiff M.L.'s bid (with four items at €0) via the strict price investigation of Article 36 and Exelia-Alterius's bid (with €1 and €15 per file) via the lighter verification of Article 35 is not unequal treatment — €0 is, per established case law, always an apparently abnormal price, whereas €1 is not necessarily.
Withdrawal of award and non-placement of video framework agreement: financial motive suffices, reference to wrong entity is superfluous ground, no legitimate expectations without concluded contract
The Council of State rejects the annulment appeal against the decision not to place a framework agreement for video services, because the financial-economic motive (joining an existing framework agreement) is lawful, the erroneous reference to 'Het Facilitair Bedrijf' instead of the Department of Chancellery and Foreign Affairs concerns a superfluous ground, and the successful tenderer cannot derive legitimate expectations from an award decision without a concluded contract.
Five lump-sum items per lot for towing services is sufficient: professional tenderer can calculate average price based on sector knowledge
The Council of State rejects the challenge against the award of a towing services contract because the contracting authority has broad discretion in drafting the inventory, the breakdown into five lump-sum items per lot is not unusual in the sector, and a professional service provider should be able to calculate a reasonable average price.
Price justification for NMBS tilting poles passes scrutiny: legal presumption of abnormal prices does not apply in simplified negotiated procedure
The Council of State rejects the suspension request because the legal presumption of abnormal prices under Article 44 §4 of the Royal Decree of 18 June 2017 does not apply to the simplified negotiated procedure, and the NMBS carefully examined and accepted the price justification of the awarded joint venture for multifunctional tilting poles on sound grounds.
Second challenge against NMBS tilting poles rejected: distinction between negotiation and price justification, selective special price investigation permitted
The Council of State also rejects the application of another tenderer against the same NMBS award for tilting poles, clarifying that a price justification is not a negotiation, that the special price investigation may be applied selectively to the first-ranked tenderer, and that repeated inquiry is permitted.
Suspension of paper framework agreement: origin certificate does not cover all offered paper types
The Council of State suspends the award of a framework agreement for eco-friendly office paper because the contracting authority failed to adequately verify whether the submitted 'Origine France Garantie' certificate covered all specific paper types in the chosen tenderer's offer, while at least one paper type is produced in Brazil.
Second round, different outcome: how a contracting authority can solidly award the same contract after a first suspension
The Council of State dismisses A2's urgent-suspension claim against the re-award to KRINKELS of a SOFICO motorway maintenance contract, because this time SOFICO produced a concrete price verification and a justified inventory reorganisation — a textbook example of a contracting authority learning from a first suspension.
Sub-criteria that only surface at evaluation? That is allowed — but only under strict EU conditions, and the challenger must prove the breach concretely
The Council of State rejects cleaning company ACTIVA's appeal against the award of five lots of cleaning for military quarters to ISS and Cleaning Masters: the delegation of power to the colonel was legitimate, the use of sub-criteria not pre-weighted complied with EU case law, and ACTIVA showed no concrete assessment error.
A humble "deemed satisfactory" next to each line: final bill 75,879.99 euros in damages
The Council of State awards POLYMAT SAV 75,879.99 euros in damages – 10% of its bid – because the Résidence Préfleuri approved GBM's price justifications with nothing more than "the response was deemed satisfactory" next to each line item.
Relying on sub-contractors? Deliver their tax and social security records too – or fail qualification
The Council of State rejects mask producer L.I. DECOR's appeal against exclusion by the French Community: a bidder relying on third-party capacity in a COVID mask procurement also had to prove those third parties had no social or tax debts.
Staying silent after a suspension cost COCOF the contract: the authority failed to request continuation and the suspended award was annulled without further debate
Because COCOF did not request continuation within thirty days of the suspension ruling, the Council of State automatically annuls the award to TPF Utilities via the short procedure — the unclear tender document clauses on clearing existing non-conformities now count definitively against the contracting authority.
UDN filed, contracting authority withdraws the award — bidder wins procedurally, but with reduced procedural indemnity
After ARTES TWT/Roegiers filed on 6 February 2024 a UDN suspension plus annulment against the award to DHERTE (€21.16 million, lot 1 of the construction of the Pôle scolaire des Grands Prés), the Province of Hainaut withdrew its decision on 8 February 2024 — result: both actions become moot, ARTES receives €770 procedural indemnity (no surcharge, because withdrawal is not an annulment).
The winner confirms the 3-week delivery by email — is that verification enough? The Council of State suspends.
The Council of State suspends, in extreme urgency, BPOST's award of a framework agreement for LED beanies to Prosafco because BPOST verified the realism of the 3-week delivery time (an award criterion) merely by asking Prosafco for confirmation — without demanding concrete justification and without addressing that verification in the award motivation.
A line item at €0 doesn't automatically make an offer irregular — the contracting authority must first prove that item is non-negligible
The Council of State suspends the rejection of an offer in which one line item (steel mounting brackets for fire extinguishers) was priced at €0, because La Sambrienne failed to motivate why that item was non-negligible and did not identify which specific requirement from the tender documents was allegedly breached.
A price review done four weeks after the award decision doesn't count — not even when two offers differ by 5.2 million euros
The Council of State suspends a NIRAS award of €13.8M for radioactive concrete dismantling work because the only trace of a price review on the Best and Final Offers was a Tractebel email dated 29 July 2024 — a month after the award decision of 28 June.
A temporary association with 'two class-5 accreditations' doesn't automatically reach class 6: main category D and subcategory D1 don't add up
The Council of State suspends an ILVO award of €3.78M for the construction of poultry research barns because one of the two joint venture partners was only accredited in subcategory D1 — not in main category D — which breaks the 'add-up' rule of article 11 §2 of the Act of 20 March 1991.
Two independent grounds for rejection: challenging only one means no standing — even if your other argument is strong
The Council of State rejects the extreme urgency suspension against the non-selection of SM Constructel for the RESA/ORES smart meter contract because the applicants did not challenge one of the two independent grounds for rejection — the absence of a VCA certificate for Modal — so the contested decision can stand on that uncontested ground alone.
If you ask everyone the same question, it's not unequal treatment — even if only one bidder has to adjust
The Council of State rejects Neovision's extreme urgency application against the award to Ecubel of refurbished laptops for Liège provincial schools because the Province could invoke article 76 §5 of the Royal Decree of 18 April 2017 to allow Ecubel to correct its offer — provided it asked all bidders the same clarification question simultaneously, which it did.
BAFO 'for better prices': the authority may skip feedback — your only bid is your only bid
The Council of State confirms that a contracting authority in a competitive procedure with negotiation may perfectly choose to give no feedback on initial offers and to request only a BAFO 'for better prices', even when one bidder scores much higher on quality and the other on price — 'negotiation' is not a second chance to rewrite your offer.
Two small Excel sheets saying '42 hours included' cost you the World Expo — while your competitor's missing offer form does not
The Council of State rejects the extreme urgency application of consortium Voysu against the award of the Belgian pavilion at Expo Osaka 2025 to Dirty Monitor, because BelExpo rightly discarded Voysu's BAFO for two added Excel tabs mentioning 'up to 2 correction rounds' and 'up to 42 hours included' — whereas the offer form that Dirty Monitor forgot to upload was not a substantial irregularity and could be requested afterwards under article 66 §3 of the Public Procurement Act.
'Prices have been checked and deemed normal' is not motivation — confidentiality is no alibi for silence on price review
The Council of State suspends the award of a €3.5M debt collection contract by SWDE and CILE to bailiff firm Étude Bordet, because the contracting authority detected apparently abnormal prices in six of seven bids but merely included a boilerplate phrase in its award report ('prices deemed normal and acceptable'), and additionally gave four bids an identical 38/40 score on methodology with identical descriptions — without demonstrating why these bids could not be distinguished.
Works 'near a river' are not similar to riverside wall construction — not even if the stakeholders and water management are identical
The Council of State rejects the suspension: SPI was entitled to consider that sinking shafts beneath the Ourthe are not 'similar works' to the construction of a quayside wall along a watercourse, even though both sites involved the same type of river environment.
The evaluation methodology may surface only in the award decision — and an offer with '…' in its lists will cost you points
The Council of State rejects the appeal: the Region was not required to disclose its evaluation methodology in advance, and the ambiguities in Production's offer (non-exhaustive format list, external DTP graphic designer of unclear cost status, paid hotline) justified the point deductions.
A consortium cannot 'borrow' a missing statutory authorisation from its licensed partner
The Council of State rejects the suspension: when a contract covers regulated activities such as private security, each member of a consortium must hold the required authorisation personally — reliance on a third party's capacity is excluded for such 'specific authorisations'.
"We want to review the arrangements" is not a valid reason to abandon an award
The Council of State suspends the Walloon Region's decision to withdraw five pellet-stove lots of a MEBAR contract and relaunch the procedure, because the reasoning — a single sentence referring to an earlier suspension ruling and to "reviewing the award arrangements" — does not allow verification that the real motives are pertinent and admissible.
Conflict of interest on paper, no damage in practice: why excluding a former employer cuts off the conflict-of-interest ground
The Council of State rejects Umami Catering's UDN challenge against the award of catering lots for Fedasil reception centres, because it fails to show interest in the conflict-of-interest ground: the former employer of the contested official was excluded anyway for wrong VAT rates, and the other official had no access to the bids.
E-bike supplier's claim against Genk's framework agreement cancellation rejected for late filing
Claim rejected: Bezõe's extreme urgency suspension claim against Genk's cancellation of the e-bike framework agreement was filed too late — the fifteen-day period starts from the sending of the registered letter, not from receipt. The Council additionally finds that budget constraints constitute valid grounds for cancellation.
FWB may validly abandon SEPPT contract after finding both offers irregular
Claim rejected: the FWB could validly abandon the SEPPT contract after finding, in a third sufficiently motivated decision, that Cohezio's offer was, like CESI's, affected by a substantive irregularity and that the disputed award criterion needed revision.
RESA cannot stop green maintenance procurement procedure without solid grounds
Suspension ordered: RESA stopped a green maintenance procurement procedure based on insufficient, inaccurate and contradictory grounds.
Questioning low prices cannot be limited to the numbers — you must also verify environmental, social and labour law compliance
The Council of State suspends the award to Vanheede Propreté of a €25 million waste collection contract because Intradel, having flagged the prices as suspiciously low, merely referred to certificates attached to the bid and never concretely verified whether the low prices were compatible with environmental, social and labour law.
Listing technical differences and then giving everyone 24 out of 30: that is how you neutralise your own quality criterion
The Belgian Council of State annuls the award of an artificial-turf pitch contract because the contracting authority listed clear technical differences between the three bids in its award report, but then gave all three an identical 24/30 for 'quality' — and only a 0.5-point difference for 'guarantees' despite warranty differences of up to ten years.
A suspiciously high price is just as problematic as a suspiciously low one — price verification must go both ways
The Council of State suspends the award of the project & construction management for Vivalia's new regional hospital to ATIS because Vivalia only challenged low prices, while the winning bid was significantly above the estimate on several items without ever being questioned.
Municipality of Westerlo must thoroughly examine unit prices in cemetery pavilion construction
Suspension ordered: Municipality of Westerlo examined only total prices but not unit prices when awarding farewell pavilion construction on cemeteries, despite large deviation percentages per item.
City of Kortrijk may award water treatment DBM contract based on total score
Claim rejected: City of Kortrijk correctly awarded a DBM contract for decentralised water treatment to BelleAqua based on the best total score, where sub-aspects of award criteria do not constitute separately weighted sub-criteria.
Your tender specifications were suspended for lack of reasoning? You don't have to lower the bar — you just have to explain better why it's set so high
After the Council of State suspended the first tender specifications for Belgium's national day festivities on grounds of inadequate reasoning for the turnover threshold, the Chancellery was allowed four days later to launch a new tender with exactly the same heightened requirements — because the res judicata of a suspension ruling does not prevent the contracting authority from taking the same decision if it fixes the illegality (the reasoning).
A contracting authority that has sat on your bid for 18 months can still walk away from the contract — even when the delay was their own fault
The Belgian Council of State dismisses Krinkels' extreme-urgency challenge against SOFICO's decision not to award three road-verge maintenance contracts: 18 months after bids opened, the tenderers' binding period had expired, and Article 85 of the Public Procurement Law of 17 June 2016 gives the contracting authority broad discretionary power to walk away and relaunch — even when the delay lies entirely with the authority itself.
Council of State suspends award of school window replacement contract in Brussels due to reference outside five-year period and inadequate price examination
The Council of State suspended on an emergency basis the award by the City of Brussels of a contract for the replacement of wooden window frames in the Queen Astrid school, because the selected tenderer had submitted a reference falling outside the five-year period required by the specifications and the general price examination was not supported by sound and careful reasoning.
Withdrawal of award decision for ARP debt recovery contract: UDN rejected – grounds challenge only surplus reasons, not the supporting grounds regarding lawyer costs and fee-sharing
The Council of State rejects the emergency suspension request by a bailiff against the withdrawal of the award decision for a debt recovery advisory contract, because the first two grounds only challenge surplus reasons regarding four zero-priced items without contesting the supporting grounds — regarding uncovered lawyer costs and fee-sharing contrary to the Royal Decree of 30 November 1976 — and because the third ground is directed against a non-existent future award decision.
ICT management Sint-Truiden: annulment – assessment methodology with sub-criteria and own scoring scale not established in advance, and rule of three incorrectly applied distorting the ratio between award criteria
The Council of State annuls the award decision of the city of Sint-Truiden for ICT infrastructure management, user support and equipment supply, because the contracting authority used an assessment methodology with sub-criteria and a separate 10-point scoring per element that was not established in advance nor announced in the specifications, and because it applied the rule of three to rescale the highest-scoring tender to 100%, thereby distorting the ratio between the award criteria.
School Het Oogappeltje Wommelgem: annulment – abnormal price detection method unverifiable and price investigation of selected items insufficient
The Council of State annuls for the second time the award decision of the municipality of Wommelgem for the extension and renovation of primary school Het Oogappeltje, because the submitted documents do not show that the detection of apparently abnormal unit prices was carried out in accordance with the contracting authority's own methodology — using a 1% rule and 30%/50% thresholds — and because the investigation of the selected items did not meet the requirements of a normally diligent contracting authority, as abnormal unit prices were accepted based on vague and general findings without requesting price justification.
Emphyteusis padel courts Asphaltcosite Asse: annulment – policy objectives as assessment elements insufficiently clear in specifications, creating near-unlimited discretion
The Council of State annuls the Asse municipal council's decision to grant an emphyteusis for padel courts, because the award criterion 'socially responsible operation' (50 points) referred to 'policy objectives' on a website containing a 191-page multi-year plan with dozens of objectives, from which the authority selected assessment elements for the first time in the evaluation report — elements not identifiable as such on the website — granting the authority near-unlimited discretion and providing insufficient safeguards against arbitrary and discriminatory assessment.
52% below the estimate and 35% below the competitor: 'no abnormal price found' is not a justification
The Council of State suspends the award of a grave monument restoration contract because the municipality of Zulte dismissed the strikingly low winning price — 52.5% below the estimate and 34.7% below the second bidder — in the award report with the standard phrase 'no abnormal total or unit prices identified', without the file showing that a genuinely diligent general price review took place.
Zandvliet waiting dock: rejection of annulment appeal – negative unit prices for soil disposal in Rotterdam insufficiently justified, contracting authority's assessment margin not exceeded
The Council of State rejects the annulment appeal by the temporary association HYE–Boskalis against the award by De Vlaamse Waterweg for the construction of a waiting dock at Zandvliet, because the negative unit prices for soil disposal in Rotterdam (-€4/m³ and -€5/m³ for items 2 and 3 of conditional part 1) were insufficiently justified — the adjustment of a reference price for Maas sand of €6.50/m³ down to €4 and €5/m³ due to 'lesser quality' lacked further specification or argumentation, and the contracting authority did not exceed its assessment margin.
Turnover threshold doubled without explanation? That's prima facie an unjustified restriction on competition
The Council of State suspends the approval of the tender specifications for the 21 July national holiday festivities because the Belgian State raised the minimum turnover requirement from a cumulative €2 million over three years to €2 million per year — without any concrete, consistent justification in the administrative file.
Defence corrected an Excel error in the winning bid without saying which one — and that single silent asterisk costs the award
The Council of State annuls Defence's award of a framework agreement for maintenance at the Florennes military zone because the award decision states that the winner's T-figure was 'rectified' from 107.36 to 91.34, but nowhere explains which error was actually corrected — and post-hoc explanations by email cannot heal that defect.
Demanding a 'team member for acoustics' without any selection criterion for acoustics: Getevallei police zone must redo the selection
The Council of State suspends the non-selection of LAVA Architects for the conversion of the police building in Tienen because the police zone excluded it for 'missing team member for acoustics and safety coordination' — while the selection guide imposed no selection criterion for those disciplines and LAVA bid as a single legal entity, not as a consortium.
A 'senior' on your CV without dates: De Watergroep may award 'good' instead of 'very good'
The Council of State rejects D-Studio's appeal against the award of a BIM framework agreement to BIM Plan: for the 'project team experience' quality criterion (30 points), an authority may rate an offer 'good' (10/30) when concrete dates are missing from CVs — the 'senior' label on its own is not proof.
Cleaning of ONSS administrative premises: suspension – the contracting authority must examine corrective measures before excluding, the obligation under art. 70(2) to proactively report corrective measures only applies with express mention in the tender documents
The Council of State suspends the ONSS's decision to exclude a cleaning company from the procedure for cleaning administrative premises (three lots), because the ONSS failed to examine the proposed corrective measures and because the obligation to proactively report such measures at the start of the procedure (art. 70(2)) only applies when the tender documents expressly refer to it — the mere use of the ESPD is insufficient.
Framework agreement for cable and catenary works on Antwerp tram network: annulment for conflict of interest – designer Tractebel as sister company of tenderer Fabricom (both Engie subsidiaries) with three of six evaluation committee members
The Council of State annuls VVM De Lijn's award decision for a framework agreement for cable and catenary works on the Antwerp tram network, because De Lijn failed in its active duty to investigate conflicts of interest: the designer Tractebel, which had drafted the specifications and was represented by three of six evaluation committee members, is a sister company of Fabricom — a partner in the winning tenderer tm Antwerpen Boven — as both are (quasi 100%) subsidiaries of Engie with shared directors, which constitutes at minimum an appearance of partiality.
Household waste management in Etalle: suspension – the 'social considerations' criterion requiring a 'note demonstrating the social character of the company' is too vague and confers unlimited freedom of choice
The Council of State orders the suspension of the commune of Etalle's decision to award the 2024-2025 household waste management contract to DURECO, because the second award criterion 'Social considerations' (20 points), described only as 'a note of maximum one A4 page demonstrating the social character of the company', lacks the clarity and precision required by article 81 of the Law of 17 June 2016 and confers an unconditional freedom of choice on the contracting authority.
School construction at Jemeppe-sur-Sambre: second suspension – responding to a price justification request by invoking a material error does not constitute a unilateral modification of the tender
The Council of State orders, for the second time, the suspension of the French Community's decision to award the school construction contract at Jemeppe-sur-Sambre, because the contracting authority committed a manifest error of assessment by qualifying as a substantive irregularity (unilateral modification of the tender) the tenderer's response to a price justification request in which it invoked a material error.
Building maintenance framework agreement: suspension for inadequate price verification – verification on only 3 of 292 items (less than 1%) is insufficient
The Council of State suspends the Brussels Port's decision to award a building maintenance framework agreement to IN ADVANCE, because the contracting entity verified prices on only 3 of the 292 items in the bill of quantities — less than 1% — by excluding all items deemed 'negligible' (less than 3% of the average global price), while articles 84 of the Law of 17 June 2016 and 43 of the Royal Decree of 18 June 2017 require verification of all unit prices.
EREA/MAAS aircraft arresting systems: technical irregularity confirmed despite identical offer accepted in previous contract
The Council rejects the suspension request against the decision declaring APK-SCAMA's offer for aircraft arresting systems at three military bases irregular, confirming that the automatic braking requirement without manual reconfiguration (specification 6.3) is not met, even though an identical offer was accepted in a previous similar contract.
Vehicle towing: environmental permit for vehicle storage implicitly covers towing services, digital police council does not affect public order
The Council rejects the annulment action against the award of a vehicle towing contract, finding that the chosen tenderer's environmental permit allows continuous operation covering towing, and that the digital police council meeting during the COVID pandemic does not affect public order.
ESPPW: renunciation after prior suspension — five grounds insufficient, reinforced motivation required
The Council suspends the French Community's decision to renounce awarding an external prevention and protection service contract, finding all five grounds for renunciation inaccurate, irrelevant or insufficiently motivated in a context requiring reinforced motivation.
Diksmuide event hall: correction of comma error and successive tender amounts justified
The Council rejects the suspension request against the award of an event hall and underground car park, finding the correction of a material error (misplaced comma) in the awardee's offer and the successive changes in tender amounts sufficiently motivated and compliant with regulations.
Tennis concession: delegation to executive bureau validated, all pleas rejected
The Council rejects the annulment action against the award of a tennis management concession, validating the delegation of powers to the executive bureau of the autonomous municipal enterprise and dismissing grievances about award criteria and motivation.
Photovoltaic panels: suspension for inaccurate irregularity and presumed financial capacity
The Council suspends the decision to award a photovoltaic panel contract to Cool Sun Energy and to exclude Klinkenberg's offer as substantially irregular, since the grounds for irregularity are inaccurate and the awardee's financial capacity was unduly presumed.
Annulment of Verviers workplace prevention services award — successful tenderer submitted 5-page note instead of 2, without the irregularity being qualified or reasoned
The Council of State annuls the award of the 'External Prevention and Protection Service' contract of the City of Verviers to SPMT ARISTA because the contracting authority noted that the successful tenderer's offer contained a 5-page A4 methodology note instead of the 2-page maximum prescribed by the specifications, but neither qualified this irregularity as substantive or non-substantive nor reasoned its decision to treat the offer as regular.
Sign the site-visit certificate, accept the consequences — even when your own staff member made the mistake
The Council of State suspends the award because Toit & Moi declared a bidder's offer irregular for an incomplete site visit, while the contracting authority itself had signed a visit attestation confirming exactly the opposite — and the award decision nowhere explains why that signed attestation suddenly carried no weight.
An unreasoned notification is not an unreasoned decision — and that distinction sinks your appeal
The Council of State dismisses an appeal against the cancellation of a vehicle-towing tender because the contested decision itself was formally reasoned, even though the bidder only saw those reasons four months later — a tardiness that costs the police zone the procedural costs but does not affect the legality of the decision.
'We have no budget left this year' is a valid reason to freeze a four-year framework agreement
The Council of State refuses to suspend a non-award decision for a four-year framework agreement on hydraulic lifts, because insufficient budget for 2024 — the year carrying the bulk of the contract — is a sound ground to refuse to conclude a contract under article 85 of the 2016 Public Procurement Act.
Partial annulment of remarketing domain concessions Genk-Zuid: halting the procedure justified, but new minimum transhipment volume of 20,800 tonnes per hectare not substantiated
The Council of State annuls De Vlaamse Waterweg's decision to organise a new award procedure for domain concessions at the Genk-Zuid industrial site with a mandatory minimum annual transhipment volume of 800 TEU or 20,800 tonnes per hectare, finding that the realistic character of this volume — nearly four times higher than the minimum for the first-line plot — was not examined, but rejects the appeal against the decision to halt the original procedure.
Bike lease suspended: three assessment errors on quality criterion bridge the points gap
The Council of State suspends the award of a framework agreement for operational bike leasing because the contracting authority made three errors in assessing the quality criterion — an unreasonable minus for mandatory maintenance, an unmotivated plus for social employment, and a non-comparative plus for a discount voucher — which together bridge the 2.5-point gap.
Loss of a chance compensated at 50%: legal error in rejecting an insurance certificate is not a purely formal defect
The Council of State awards reparatory damages of EUR 28,126.32 to a tenderer excluded from a public works contract, finding that the contracting authority's legal error — rejecting an insurance certificate solely because it was dated after the bid opening — resulted in a 50% loss of a chance of obtaining the contract.
Partial suspension of a railway bearings contract: the minimum ten-day deadline also applies to subsequent offers in special sectors
The Council of State suspends the execution of the award decision for a railway bearings contract (121 lots out of 404) because, on the one hand, the seven-day deadline granted for submitting a third offer falls short of the minimum ten-day period provided by Article 120(2) of the Act of 17 June 2016 and, on the other hand, the formal statement of reasons is insufficient both regarding the substantial nature of the irregularity found in the offer and regarding the per-lot comparison of tenders.
Four paragraphs of motivation that all repeat 'it's a different molecule' is not motivation
The Council of State suspends a €138 million framework agreement for cancer drugs at CHU Liège because the contracting authority rejected TEVA's equivalent offer (lipegfilgrastim instead of pegfilgrastim) without explaining why two molecules that serve the same therapeutic purpose are not equivalent in this case.
Two different references, two identical scores: that needs an explanation
The Council of State suspends the award because Idelux gave the same 5/5 score to a 134-seat reference and a 156-seat reference without any explanation — and because a different score on that single sub-sub-criterion was just enough to flip the ranking.
When a non-selection rests on multiple independent grounds, you must attack each — or your appeal is doomed
Flying Group Holding only challenged the optional exclusion ground about Chinese ties, but Defence had two other — unchallenged — grounds for non-selection, and those alone were enough to keep the decision standing.
Director-company, permanent representative, special mandate: Charleroi skipped the entire chain and wrongly voided the offer
The city of Charleroi declared the TAROS-TRBA offer null because it 'could not confirm' the signing power of the natural person who signed — yet the chain of director-companies, permanent representatives and special powers of attorney was right there in the offer's annexes.
When the contracting authority 'loses' your offer, your stamped envelope saves you
The Berchem-Sainte-Agathe public welfare centre awarded a medication contract to Pharma Force on the ground that 'two offers were received' — but Multipharma had filed its offer on time, as proven by a stamped envelope with date and time, and the Council of State annuls the award.
If you first declare a bid irregular and then accept it anyway, you must say more — not less
The Council of State suspends the award of six artificial football pitches to Sportinfrabouw because the municipality of Beveren, after having declared two bids substantially irregular, changed its mind without properly justifying that reversal.
Communicating only points for the price criterion is motivation theatre: without the percentages, nobody can verify your 'rule of three' was correctly applied
The Council of State annuls via the expedited procedure (art. 17 §6 coordinated laws) the STIB decision of 3 May 2023 awarding a tax consultancy contract to Forecast Consulting, because the reasoned decision merely listed points per bidder for the price criterion without showing the proposed percentages or the application of the price formula.
A contracting authority can cancel and restart a procedure — even if that costs you a near-guaranteed award
The Council of State dismisses Theis Marcel's challenge against SOFICO: under Article 85 of the Belgian procurement law, a contracting authority has broad discretion to cancel and restart a procedure, even after two previous awards have been suspended and a competitor is next in line.
Parallel judgment on lot 2 Spy: the contracting authority's broad power to cancel and restart applies equally here
In the same SOFICO saga as judgment 258.032, but for lot 2 (Spy district), the Council of State confirms that Theis Marcel cannot claim the award: Article 85 of the procurement law allows the authority to abandon and restart the procedure with a corrected specification.
The government communicates only the 'eviction' — hiding the award in the same decision. The Council of State breaks through this formalism.
The Council of State rejects the Belgian State's inadmissibility objection: a rejected tenderer who challenges only the 'eviction letter' procedurally attacks the entire award decision contained within it — even if the award itself was never formally communicated.
An EU regulation alone doesn't make a tender 'substantially irregular' — if the contract documents don't say the requirement is essential, you have to explain why it is
The Council of State suspends the award of a Walloon school-fruit contract to Fresho because the Walloon Region rejected Faway's bid as 'substantially irregular' (proposing chicory in June) without explaining in the award decision itself why seasonality was an essential requirement — a reference to the EU regulation didn't suffice, since the contract documents nowhere classified seasonality as substantial.
Software that still 'needs adapting' to NMBS's TPST platform is not a substantial irregularity — and you cannot include energy consumption from the TCO formula in the abnormality test
The Council of State dismisses Moser-Baer's appeal against the award to Westerstrand of a 4.57 million euro framework agreement for industrial GPRS clocks at Belgian railway stations, and also rejects the 726,092.80 euro damages claim.
'Will have to comply with the tender requirements' is not a compliant bid — it's a future promise, and that means substantial irregularity
The Council of State suspends in extreme urgency the Régie des Bâtiments' award of a framework contract for detention-house containers to the ALHO/Hendrickx/C2O consortium because the winning bid said nothing concrete about the mandatory 'water management' minimum requirement — the award decision itself acknowledged that ALHO 'will have to comply with the tender requirements', and the move to recast that requirement as a 'special performance condition' did not persuade.
A price check that only looks at total bid amounts isn't a price check — unit prices don't quietly fall under 'all normal'
The Council of State suspends Charleroi public-health intercommunal ISPPC's award of its medical-mail contract to Postalia Belgium because the bid analysis report compared total bid amounts but contains no proof of any concrete unit-price verification — and an 'all normal' line in the observations note does not cure that.
'Public contract' in the title, concession in the facts — only the second matters
The Council of State dismisses LED AD's appeal against the award of an LED-screen concession to Cityscreen because the city legally treated the contract as a concession, despite the term 'public contract' in the heading of the award decision.
An award decision is not a contract — until closing, the authority can always backtrack
The Council of State confirms that the Flemish Region was allowed to withdraw its award decision to Zidis five months after notification, because the contract had not yet been concluded and Article 85 of the Public Procurement Act 2016 gives the authority the power to halt the procedure at any time before closing — regardless of irregularity.
A price justification can be in words — but not in clichés
The Council of State suspends the award of the Bosvoorde racetrack renovation to Heyrman-De Roeck because Leefmilieu Brussel accepted a price justification consisting of purely generic elements ('experience', 'cooperation', 'CO2 reduction'), without numerical substantiation and without any substantive evaluation by the contracting authority itself.
Mini-competition under a framework agreement? A price ceiling is not a price examination
The Council of State suspends the award of a 224,400-euro IT contract because the Walloon Region failed to verify the prices submitted in a mini-competition and limited the motivation of the quality criterion to repeating the rating scale.
Want to challenge a technical evaluation? First calculate whether your grievances can bridge the score gap — otherwise you lose your standing
The Council of State rejects Frontforce's appeal against the award of a dispatching software contract to BV Verdi: one branch was declared inadmissible because a hypothetical recalculation showed that the 7.11-point score gap could not be bridged even if all grievances were upheld.
Confidentiality is no excuse to black out the assessment of the winner
The Council of State suspends an award because the contracting authority redacted nearly all of the winner's evaluation in the version of the award report given to the unsuccessful bidder, and only filed the unredacted version once court proceedings had started.
Challenging a scoring error is pointless if you can't catch up with the winner anyway
The Council of State rejects an extreme-urgency suspension against the award of seven electric service vehicles because even a possible error in the distance calculation would not bridge the 16.59-point gap with the winning bidder.
Rejecting a bid for abnormal prices? You must also state why those items are 'non-negligible'
The Belgian Council of State suspends the award of a green-space maintenance contract to Eurogreen because Bruxelles Environnement explained in detail why two of Krinkels' unit prices were abnormal — one assumed a gardener mowing eleven football fields a day — but nowhere motivated why those items qualified as 'non-negligible' under Article 36 of the Royal Decree of 18 April 2017.
Six abnormally low prices, six times 'answer satisfactory' — that is not a price review
The Belgian Council of State annuls a €655,708 award to GBM because the contracting authority dismissed six abnormally low prices with the same boilerplate line 'la réponse a été jugée satisfaisante', without obtaining a single purchase document or supplier catalogue.
When two bidders in a three-player market suddenly claim twice as many partners, you have to verify — not explain it away
The Council of State suspends an electronic meal-voucher award to Edenred because the French Community uncritically accepted Edenred's dramatically higher partner numbers (39,103 vs 20,592 in Flanders) when Edenred's own offer signaled those figures included MasterCard merchants without genuine affiliation contracts.
A reference 'since 1969' built from one-off jobs can still qualify as a 'long-running contract/framework agreement'
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency suspension against the City of Ghent, accepting that 'Ghent University — since 1969, mainly student housing, always one-off jobs' qualifies as a long-running contract under the tender's selection criterion.
Two sister companies, one signature and a score of 5/10 on a 0-2-4-6-8-10 scale: double suspension
The Council of State suspends the award of a 6.7 million euro framework contract for police trousers to Sioen Nederland because the federal police inadequately reasoned the link between Sioen NV and Sioen Nederland BV, and because one competitor (Seyntex) received intermediate scores on an evaluation scale that only allowed even-numbered points.
An oral statement during the site visit doesn't amend the tender — and so cannot make an offer irregular
The Council of State suspends the award of an asbestos-removal contract to Laurenty because the Régie des Bâtiments rejected SBMI's offer based on an oral instruction given during the site visit and only partially addressed SBMI's price justification in its reasoning.
Same ADN certificate: 'extra experience' for the winner, ignored for the loser — that doesn't hold
The Belgian Council of State suspended an award by Flemish Waterways because in the quality criterion motivation, the same elements (an ADN certificate, government experience, examination committee work) counted positively for one bidder and were ignored for another, without anywhere explaining the difference.
Rejecting a bid for one item worth 0.12% of the total? Then you really must explain why that's 'substantial'
The Belgian Council of State suspended the award of a bike path in Seraing because the city declared Colas Belgium's bid void over a single irregular item representing 0.12% of the bid total, without anywhere explaining why that irregularity was 'substantial'.
Hide your purchase price in the rental cost, and you write your own bid into the bin
The Belgian Council of State dismisses Symobo's challenge: by openly admitting in its price justification that it had shifted part of the purchase price into the rental items 'for commercial reasons', it made its bid incomparable with the competitor's — and therefore substantially irregular.
What the tender documents functionally require is a minimum requirement — even if the word 'mandatory' or 'module' never appears
The Council of State refuses suspension: a tool that the specifications require to perform 'native' analyses against ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 is a minimum requirement under article 76 of the placement royal decree — failing to demonstrate that functionality renders the offer substantially irregular, even if the documents never used the word 'modules'.
Citing the winner's patent report is not a motivation — even if the report is confidential
The Council of State suspends the award by AGSO Knokke-Heist because the contracting authority dismissed a substantiated patent objection from a losing bidder by merely stating that the winners 'confidently affirm' their offer infringes nothing — without explaining why it found their report more convincing.
In a negotiated procedure you may refuse regularisation — but the file must show you considered it
The Council of State suspends the award of lot 2 of La Louvière's parks-guarding contract because the contracting authority, when finding Seris Security's offer substantially irregular for an 'abnormally low' price, failed to demonstrably weigh whether to allow regularisation under article 76, § 5, of the placement royal decree — a discretionary power that must actually be exercised.
'The Price Bureau looked at it' is not a price check — especially not when that opinion itself asks for your own analysis
The Council of State suspends an award by the Walloon Region to Colas Belgium for road works in Biercée because the contracting authority motivated its price check with the bare statement that 'the Price Bureau intervened' — while that bureau's own opinion expressly required a separate analysis from the road directorate that nowhere appears in the file.
A 'request for clarification' is not a price investigation — only a real suspicion of abnormality triggers the wage / CLA check
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award of the OTW guarding contract for Namur station to Securitas: a request asking the bidder to explain price differences between rate items does not constitute a formal price investigation under article 44 of the special-sectors royal decree — and without that investigation, no obligation to verify wage and collective-bargaining compliance is triggered.
A 100 ml bottle of paracetamol is not 100 ml of storage space — Swisslog forgot the bottle, the air gap and the packaging, and lost a Charleroi hospital contract
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award of automated medication cabinets for CHU Charleroi because Swisslog Healthcare based its capacity figures on the volume of medication contents alone — not on the volume of bottles, vials and packaging — leaving its offer prima facie three drawers short on a single cabinet.
School logo on cleaners' uniforms is no hidden sub-award criterion — three rounds of re-awarding confirm it
The Council of State rejects Iris Facility Solutions' suspension claim against GO! Scholengroep Huis 11: assessing 'staff policy', 'wearing the school logo on work clothes' and 'mandatory refresher training' under the award criterion 'quality control' does not create hidden sub-criteria as long as those elements were listed in the specifications as attention points.
€1 million cheaper and still excluded: forgotten road signalling in item B.01.01 makes the bid irregular
The Council of State confirms that Wallonia rightly excluded the lowest bidder (€4.52M) because one major item of its price justification did not include the legally required road signalling — and may simultaneously accept the winner (€5.80M) on the basis of a short but concrete reasoning.
Trade secrets are not a free pass for a boilerplate clause when prices look abnormally low
The Council of State suspends the award of two SNCB lots because the contracting authority itself flagged the winner's prices as apparently abnormally low, requested justification, and then dismissed the response with a single sentence in the award decision.
Discount for multi-lot award? Then you must rank three times — not once
The Council of State suspends Idelux's award of nine waste-collection lots to Remondis because the intercommunal compared all offers against a single reference point (Remondis with discount) instead of ranking each scenario separately — a calculation error that shifted the outcome in Remondis's favour.
A services concession does not oblige you to conduct a price examination — even if prices differ markedly
The Council of State rejects EMG's claim against the Belgian State concerning the IPC audiovisual concession and explicitly confirms that neither the concession law nor the principles of due care, equality or competition trigger an obligation to conduct a price examination in concessions — a key difference from public procurement regulation.
70 points for service, 30 for price in a book tender: acceptable when the market justifies it
The Council of State dismisses Standaard Boekhandel's challenge against the award to Distri-Bib for the Antwerp public library's book framework, accepting that service may weigh 70 out of 100 points because 85% of deliveries fall under the regulated book price.
The cheapest and best-quality bid still loses. The culprit: how the price criterion was split
The Council of State dismisses Canon's challenge against the award of the Farys printer fleet framework to Ricoh, despite Canon submitting both the lowest overall price and the highest-quality offer — because Farys split the price criterion into three sub-criteria (devices 50%, management software 10%, additional services 5%) based on a documented market study and needs survey, and the weights stand 'in reasonable relation' to the likely importance of each component.
Bruxelles Environnement invented a 'competitive advantage' the law does not recognise — the Council suspends the re-tendering of the climbing-rock case
The Council of State suspends Bruxelles Environnement's decision to abandon the award and re-tender the 'Aménagements paysagers' contract for Anderlecht's Colombophiles park, because the contracting authority committed three legal errors: a deviation from the specifications was wrongly called a 'variant', an irregularity was declared substantial under a non-existent category 'competitive advantage', and a material specification (resin concrete) was wrongly treated as a brand reference under art. 53.
A young company may bid — but if you select it, you have to explain explicitly why you see no continuity risk
The Council of State suspends the award of Sport Vlaanderen's framework agreement for pop-up skateparks because the contracting authority justified its choice for a company able to submit only one truncated financial year — while the tender required three years — with the perfunctory line 'there is no reason to assume that the continuity of the contract cannot be guaranteed'.
Saying a lawyer has 'no State aid experience' while crediting his teaching of competition law that includes State aid is a contradictory motivation — and it gets annulled
The Council of State annuls the award of lot 18 (State aid) of the Walloon framework agreement for legal services because the evaluation panel wrote that Lexing's lawyer 'lacked practical experience in State aid' while in the same motivation acknowledging that he taught a university course on economic aspects of competition law and was a member of a research centre studying State aid.
If your tender allows subcontracting and the bidder names Bpost as subcontractor, you cannot reject them with 'you don't have the BIPT licence'
The Council of State annuls the award of Defence's multi-year postal services contract to Bpost because Postalia Belgium's offer was declared irregular for lacking a BIPT licence, while that offer explicitly designated Bpost as subcontractor for distribution — a possibility the tender itself expressly allowed.
An offer without a minus sign is not a negative price — and 'clarifying' it by email after the evaluation report does not save the award
The Council of State suspends the award to Oxfam-Solidarité of a textile collection contract in BEP-Environnement's recycling parks because the contracting authority assigned eleven points to a price of '€1' it treated as negative, while the bid carried no minus sign and the bidder's written confirmation arrived five days after the evaluation report on which the award is based.
Three weeks faster than the winner — and yet the same 20/30: a bonus clause for early delivery you don't apply costs you the award
The Council of State annuls the City of Halle's award of the floor renewal of CC 't Vondel to Phenix Group: the specifications stated that an early delivery would have a 'favourable influence' on the execution-time criterion, but the City gave both Phenix Group and Stals en Zoon Parketvloeren — whose delivery was three weeks shorter — an identical score of 20 out of 30 with the sole motivation 'falls perfectly within [the] requested period'.
BAFO by email instead of e-Tendering: prima facie unlawful — but if you take the email yourself, you can no longer claim an interest in challenging it
The Council of State rejects Spikes NV's extreme-urgency action against the award to Skyhaus BV of an IT contract for the pseudonymisation and automatic summarisation of court decisions — three 'clever' attacks (wrong award amount, price evaluation method, BAFO by email) all fail, and the ruling confirms in passing that e-Tendering is also mandatory for BAFOs, even though the contracting authority is saved here by lack of interest.
An offer 54% below the average still gets awarded — because the 15% rule targets the total price, not every unit price
The Council of State refuses to suspend a Sofico award to Men At Work for €456,120.80 — even though the offer was 54% below the average — because Article 36, §4 of the Procurement Royal Decree only requires verification of the total price and the contracting authority enjoys broad discretion in doing so.
A second 'reasoned decision' that fixes the numbers does not save the first
On 4 May 2023 STIB sent MoneyOak a reasoned award decision listing only the scores per bidder — and on 26 May, after the action was already filed, a 'complete' version including the percentages; the Council of State suspends nonetheless because the first version is the one that must be assessed legally.
Requested toilet-replacement simulation rescues bid with installation coefficient 0.2 against price challenge
Imtech bid installation coefficients of 0.2 to 0.5 for sanitary works in Brussels — far below competitors — compensating with a higher materials coefficient; the City asked for a simulation on concrete line items and accepted the justification, and the Council of State follows: in a unit-price contract, what counts is the combination of elements, not one isolated low number.
49% under estimate, no price justification requested — a two-page internal memo suffices
Eqos Energie lost to De Witte-Vandecaveye, who bid 27% below the average and 49% below the estimate — without STIB-MIVB requesting a price justification; the Council held that the internal memo analyzing market fluctuations and historical prices was sufficient, even without a formal challenge.
An Apple discount only meaningful when bundled with a laptop: post-factum motivation does not count
PXL university college awarded an Apple supply contract to Econocom because of an unusually high discount on one specific product; the Council suspends because the administrative file lacks any explanation — and the argument that 'this product is only ordered with a laptop' was raised only in the procedural notes.
€21M versus €36M and €40M: a price matching the estimate is not an abnormal price — even when competitors quote double
SNCB awards an 8-year framework agreement for ticket machines to Conduent at €21.4 million while Almex bid €36.2M and Scheidt&Bachmann €39.7M — and the Council refuses suspension under extreme urgency because Almex did not directly attack one essential reason given by SNCB: that Conduent's amount matches the original estimate, and that single reason suffices to remove any appearance of abnormality.
BNP downloaded, signed with Adobe Sign and re-uploaded — Treasury said 'not signed', the Council sided with BNP
BNP Paribas Fortis was excluded from the federal payment-accounts procedure because its submission report was not signed directly via e-tendering, but downloaded, signed locally with Adobe Sign by two authorised representatives and re-uploaded — a workflow that is precisely described as valid in the official FOD BOSA e-Tendering Handbook, and that neither the 2017 Procurement Royal Decree nor the selection guide prohibits.
Strict for the excluded bidder, lenient for the winner — a contracting authority cannot apply the same rule both ways at once
The Belgian Council of State suspends the award of Walloon red-light speed cameras because the Walloon Region rejected Jacops's offer over a technical detail, while simultaneously scoring the winner just above the exclusion threshold for a software demonstration 'essentially given via PowerPoint' — when the tender required a live demo on penalty of exclusion.
Below the European threshold a contracting authority is not required to ask for price justification — but 'not required' is not the same as 'forbidden'
The Belgian Council of State suspends an award because the Province of Antwerp rejected a sole trader's offer for an abnormally low hourly rate of €34.70 without first questioning the bidder — when the tender concerns intellectual services without any indicative quantity, mere price difference is insufficient to unilaterally conclude the price falls 'below cost'.
An 'abnormally high' negative price is just as suspicious as an abnormally low one — IVAGO learned that the hard way
The Belgian Council of State suspends a textile collection contract because IVAGO accepted the winning bid of €1 million (in a contract where bidders pay the authority) without numerical substantiation, while that price was double what the same bidders had offered in comparable contracts.
What 'equivalent dimensions' means is in the specifications — not in your head: three projects with two Ku/Ka 6m Cassegrain antennas isn't an example, it's the definition
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency action of Spanish company Indra Sistemas against its non-selection for the Defense satellite antenna procurement (Singa IV): when the specifications precisely define what 'projects of equivalent dimension' means, the bidder cannot afterwards rely on a broader reading based on its general sector experience.
Rejecting bidder A for a specific shortcoming while admitting bidder B with exactly the same shortcoming is not allowed
The Council of State annuls the award of a Liège public works contract because the city declared Genetec's offer irregular for missing a detailed cost calculation of safety measures, while the winning Yvan Paque offer on that very point contained only two lump sums — without any detail.
Unilaterally redrawing the price structure of an offer and calling it 'arithmetic-error correction' doesn't work — article 34 only covers errors whose result is contrary to the bidder's intention
The Council of State suspends the award of Charleroi's contract for rental and maintenance of work clothing because the city unilaterally 'corrected' CWS Workwear's prices under article 34 of the Procurement Royal Decree — while the alleged 'error' did not produce a result contrary to the bidder's intention, and the city did not seek the bidder's real intention but applied its own conception of what was acceptable.
Between article 35 and article 36 of the Procurement Royal Decree lies a threshold: an explanation that smoothly passes the general price examination doesn't have to become a formal price justification
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency action against the award of an architectural study contract in Boom: a contracting authority that, in the context of the general price-and-cost examination (article 35), receives an explanation it finds convincing — adequately motivated — does not have to launch the heavier procedure of article 36 (formal price justification).
A price examination that says 'normal' in the award decision and just repeats the same sentence elsewhere in the file is not a price examination
The Council of State suspends the award of the Fedasil meal-catering contract to Aramark because the Federal Public Service Internal Affairs only states in the award decision that the prices are 'normal' and merely repeats that statement verbatim in the technical analyses — while Aramark bid more than 15% below the estimate for lot 2 and the Council finds no concrete trace of an actual general price examination in the file.
A price analysis discussing only the more expensive offers leaves the winner out of frame — and missing the winner is missing the essence of the price examination
The Council of State suspends the award of the AViQ statutory auditor contract to L&S Réviseurs because the award report explains why the more expensive offers (RSM Inter Audit and the applicant) were higher, but says nothing about the price examination of the winner — while AViQ had built a 25% indexation into its estimate and the winner bid below that level.
Subsidising authority says no — award withdrawn — and the motivation 'in view of the letter from the subsidising authority' is enough
The Council of State rejects Genetec's extreme-urgency action against the withdrawal of the Marche-en-Famenne LED-bike-path-lighting award: a conflict with the Walloon subsidising authority over the specifications is in itself a valid reason for the city to abandon the contract, and the municipal decision need not repeat the subsidising authority's reasons — a reference to the letter is sufficient as 'motifs des motifs'.
An award report that also voices criticism of the winner is no reason to overturn the award — what counts is what the report puts beside it
The Council of State rejects an extreme-urgency action against the award of an architecture contract for a Schaarbeek crèche: the fact that the award report also expresses reservations about the winner does not mean the score of 4 out of 5 is unjustified, when alongside it five concrete advantages are listed that the applicants' bid does not offer.
Complaining that the specifications are unlawful while simultaneously demanding the contract be awarded to you — that does not work
The Council of State rejects a third extreme-urgency action against Ghent University Hospital: after the contracting authority withdrew earlier awards to a competitor and ultimately cancelled the entire procedure to fix a flaw in the specifications about INAMI/RIZIV reimbursement, the bidders who had themselves pointed out that flaw cannot now claim a 'direct' award.
A withdrawn award decision legally no longer exists — so there is no 'change of position' to motivate
The Council of State rejects the suspension of a second Infrabel award decision, ruling that a contracting authority that withdraws its first decision and re-examines the offers does not have to explain why it now reaches a different conclusion — the first decision retroactively disappeared upon withdrawal and cannot serve as a reference point for a 'change of position'.
If the tender documents make award conditional on a homologation 'before award', its absence is automatically a substantial irregularity
The Council of State rejects the suspension of a contract for 60,000 LED luminaires for the Liège grid operator RESA: by stating in the specifications that the luminaire model must have obtained the Synergrid '005' homologation 'before award of the contract', the specifications themselves qualified this as a minimum and substantial requirement — so Lightwell and Axioma's offers could be excluded as substantially irregular even though they had been invited to a BAFO and offered competitive prices.
A price 25% below the average survives — and the winner can still ask for an extra €100,000 once the bid commitment period expires
The Council of State rejects an extreme-urgency action against the award of the Bruges artificial-turf contract to Lesuco: a total price 25% below the average can be justified by 'market leadership, turnover and expertise', and when the bid commitment period expires, the winner may request price increases due to market conditions without the other bidders getting a chance to revise their bids.
Deciding not to negotiate in a competitive procedure with negotiation: only if you concretely prove the bids meet your needs
The Council of State suspends the decision of the municipality of Auderghem to discard an architects' team's bid for exceeding a page limit in a competitive procedure with negotiation, because the municipality cannot show anywhere that it actually assessed whether the regular bids met its needs before deciding not to negotiate.
A natural-stone boulder where the spec required 'resin concrete': Brussels-Environment punished the compliant bidder, rewarded the deviant — and lost the contract
The Council of State suspends the award of a €4.2 million park redevelopment in Anderlecht because the contracting authority gave the winning bidder bonus points for a natural-stone climbing rock when the specifications explicitly required 'resin concrete' — and so pushed the rule-compliant competitor into second place by 1.68 points.
Demoing 'the wrong product' at your clarification session is not an innocent slip — it cost Roba Pharma 22 points and the contract
The Council of State rejects Roba Pharma's request for suspension because the contracting hospital plausibly assessed its offer for two lots of medicine cabinets worth €2.6 million as poor — partly because Roba Pharma spent its clarification session demonstrating a product that wasn't even in the offer.
A legally required authorisation does not have to be present at the time of the offer — even for emptying septic tanks — if the specifications do not impose it as a selection criterion
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award to TPRecup of lot 3 (waste collection and septic tanks) at Spa-Francorchamps, holding that the absence of the Walloon authorisation as 'vidangeur agréé' at the time of the offer does not constitute irregularity when neither regulation nor specifications impose it as a selection criterion.
When lots are involved, the contracting authority may require references to fit the lot — even if the specifications do not say so explicitly
The Council of State refuses to suspend Spa-Francorchamps' decision not to select TPRecup for lots 1 (track maintenance) and 2 (cleaning of internal roads), holding that it is reasonable to require references relevant to the specific lot — even where the specifications do not differentiate between lots.
You cannot dismiss an offer as 'abnormally priced' when that price, by your own formula, is not abnormal at all
The Council of State holds that SOFICO wrongly declared the offer of Sotraliège (€4.5 million for cleaning storm-water basins in Liège) irregular for 'abnormal price', because the contested unit prices were — by SOFICO's own mathematical criteria — not abnormal at all; but the Council nonetheless refuses suspension because of flooding risk.
Whoever lost the 12-year IRISnet3 contract gets no second chance in extreme urgency — five grounds, all 'not serious'
The Council of State rejects Proximus' extreme-urgency suspension claim against the award of the IRISnet3 contract to Orange Belgium: all five pleas — alleged irregularity of the winner's free tools, abnormal pricing, regularisation issues and evaluation of qualitative criteria — are deemed 'not serious'.
A forgotten check of exclusion grounds for company directors can be cured during the proceedings — stripping the applicant's interest in the ground
The Council of State rejects the suspension of a 59 million euro framework agreement for fibre to Flemish schools, where the applicant discovered that the contracting authority had only requested the criminal record of Telenet as a legal entity, not of its directors as required by article 67 §1 paragraph 5 — but the authority had since obtained those extracts during the proceedings, depriving the applicant of its interest in the ground.
Filling in 'included' for 11 lines of your bill of quantities can be lawful — if you can justify each clustering separately
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency suspension against the award of a kindergarten construction contract to VMG-De Cock because the contracting authority correctly accepted the eleven 'included' lines in the winner's bill of quantities after a substantiated justification was given per line and the tender documents did not require a separate price for any of those lines.
Withdraw a first award decision and re-award to the other bidder? The motivation has to genuinely explain why you changed your mind
The Council of State suspends Verviers' second award decision because the motivation — a string of 'stereotyped formulas' on the conformity of the offers — does not show that the contracting authority actually carried out a fresh regularity check after withdrawing its first award, which had been based precisely on the substantial irregularity of that same offer.
A 'required option' rules your bid out, an 'allowed option' does not — and what the tender does not impose as a minimum, bidders are free to limit
The Council of State dismisses Siemens Mobility's extreme-urgency challenge to the award of the Hermelijn tram midlife revision to CAF (76.75 vs 70.94 out of 100): CAF was free to limit its corrosion treatment to 20 m² of light rust per tram and 3 cracks because the tender set no minimum surface area, free to overlap its study and prototype phases because the tender only required a 40-day gap between document submission and prototype start, and free to offer an incomplete anti-collision system because that was an 'allowed' (not 'required') option — and Article 56 § 2 of the Royal Decree on special sectors 2017 only sanctions the option itself in that case, not the base bid.
An 'analogous contract' is not automatically a 'public contract', and calling a bid 'irregular' without examining the substantial nature of the irregularity is not a reasoning — Vivalia sees its award suspended
The Council of State suspends Vivalia's decision to exclude C-Consult Advice from its RHM software contract because Vivalia added two conditions that were not in the tender — references had to come from public (not private) contracts and could not concern a software update — and, on the irregularity ground, did not examine whether the irregularity was substantial, with reasoning resting on undocumented phone calls absent from the administrative file.
A scoring formula that amplifies point differences is allowed — provided the tender documents disclose it upfront
The Council of State rejects an appeal against the award of a €125 million Flemish postal services framework agreement and rules that tender documents may rescale scores on a qualitative criterion so the best bid automatically receives 100% — even if this significantly amplifies the point differences.
If you allow Art. 66 §3 supplementation of references, your motivation must show that the supplement actually meets the threshold
The Council of State annuls the award of the Charleroi maintenance contract for high-voltage cabins because the city let two competitors complete their qualitative selection file but failed to show in its motivation that the supplemented references actually reach the required threshold of 50,000 € HT per year.
Your 10/10 from last year doesn't entitle you to the same score this year
The Council of State rejects Royal Eijkelkamp's emergency suspension request against the award of a €465,850 water-quality contract to Koenders Instruments — the fact that the applicant scored 10/10 on two sub-criteria in an earlier similar procurement does not constitute a serious ground.
Statutory representation isn't the same as 'daily management' — don't conflate the two when nullifying a bid
The Council of State suspends Charleroi's decision to declare the lowest bid (€195,200) null for 'unproven signature authority' because the city wrongly conflated 'external representation power' with 'daily management'.
Telenet bids 50% cheaper, Proximus demands a price review — the Council: with two bidders, cheap is not yet abnormal
The Council of State rejects Proximus' extreme-urgency challenge to Belnet's award to Telenet of a 5-year connectivity framework, because a price gap of more than 50% and €5 million does not automatically signal an abnormal price — certainly not with only two bidders and a winner that substantiated its pricing in detail.
In a negotiated procedure you may let the winner cure a missing electronic signature — provided you motivate it 'in pure opportunity'
ETNIC was allowed to let BONJOUR INC cure its missing qualified electronic signature and then award the Pix promotion campaign — the Council finds the short motivation ('we regularise as a matter of opportunity') sufficient in a negotiated procedure without publication.
0.11 points apart on a DBM contract worth hundreds of millions — and the Council sides with the authority
Two Belgian construction heavyweights clashed over the new defence headquarters tender; Futureproof Defence finished 0.11 points behind Be Defence and raised five substantial-irregularity grounds, but the Council held that Defence stayed within its broad margin of appreciation and rejected every ground.
'Prices were adjusted where necessary': three words in a tender evaluation report enough to suspend De Lijn's printing framework
The Council of State suspends LijnCom's award of the framework contract for printing and adhesive advertising on De Lijn buses to 3Motion, because after the price justification round the contracting authority 'adjusted' some of the winner's unit prices — whereas article 36, § 3 of the 2017 placement royal decree offers only three options: reject the tender, reject the tender, or give reasons why the total amount is not abnormal.
The width requirement was 'crucial' for Hilton and a 'target' for Vanderr — with no paper trail, De Lijn has to start over
The Council of State suspends the award of an overhead line maintenance vehicle for the Ghent tram network to Vanderr, because De Lijn first labelled the width requirement (2300 mm) as 'crucial' to Hilton Engineering and then treated it as a 'target' for Vanderr, without any written trace of that change of treatment in the administrative file.
'Yes / no / in order': checkboxes in a table are no motivation for technical regularity — certainly not when the Synergrid homologation is wobbly
The Council of State suspends RESA's 10 million-euro award for 60,000 LED luminaires to Axioma-Lightwell and Schreder because the evaluation report substantiates the technical regularity of the winning tenders merely with three checkboxes reading 'non', 'non' and 'en ordre' — whereas at the hearing it emerged that the driver in the winning offer is not the one with which the luminaire obtained its Synergrid 005 homologation.
'By submitting its bid the bidder accepts all clauses of the tender' — that clause does not save Janssen-Fritsen when it imposes its own payment terms
The award of the sports-hall flooring in Heers is annulled because the winning bid from Janssen-Fritsen imposed its own payment schedule — 30% on order, 50% at site start, 20% on handover — where the tender required a single payment on completion, and the standard 'by submission the bidder accepts the tender' clause cannot erase that deviation.
33 x 48 x 81 cm with 10% tolerance: a coffee machine ten centimetres too big does affect the price and maintenance criteria
Liège's Citadelle Hospital awarded a five-year framework for coffee and 90 coffee machines to Illico, but the Council of State suspends the award because it is unclear which machine model Illico actually offered, and the tested model exceeded the bespoke dimensions by ten to twenty per cent with no reasoning given for that deviation.
G4S loses by 1.38 points and receives three 'negatives' — the Council finds two of them indistinguishable from weaknesses in the winning bid
The Council of State suspends the award of security services for the South Tower to Seris Security because the reasons given for three negative marks against incumbent G4S do not explain why it scored 3.5 points less than the winning bidder on the quality criterion — when the same weaknesses appear in the winning bid too.
When four out of five bidders deviate from the zoning plan in identical fashion, the problem is not with the bidders
The Council of State suspends under extreme urgency the award of the design-and-build contract for the new Neptunus swimming pool in Ghent because TMVW declared the bids of four of the five bidders substantially irregular — after eight months of negotiations — for a zoning-plan deviation that the specifications never expressly excluded, and then refused the regularisation opportunity the specifications themselves promised.
After a successful suspension, Liège withdraws the award — and in the restart awards the contract to the original challenger
The Council of State holds the annulment action by Liège Dépannage et Services moot after the City of Liège, following a successful extreme-urgency suspension by that same bidder, withdrew its award to U.C. Automobiles, restarted the procedure and ultimately awarded the contract to Liège Dépannage itself — but still grants the challenger a €700 procedural indemnity.
'Per-lot ranking' can also mean 'global ranking with per-lot derivation' — and if you don't clarify in advance, the authority decides
The Council of State dismisses Ghent University's suspension against the award of the VDAB GLOW contract because the specification allowed all 18 bidders to be ranked globally — not per lot — meaning Divergent lost its two East-Flemish lots to organisations that bid for other provinces.
Four Limburg training organisations lost all their home lots to Randstad and Emino — and the Council of State can't do anything about it
The Council of State dismisses the extreme-urgency suspension by a consortium of four Limburg specialised training, coaching and mediation services against the award of the VDAB GLOW contract because the specification permitted a global ranking of all 18 bidders and because their local entrenchment and 'evidence-based I care' programme do not oblige the contracting authority to award a higher score.
A 'NOK' that becomes 'OK' after follow-up questions is not automatically an unlawful regularisation — if it concerns selection, not the offer itself
The Council of State dismisses Coeman Repatriëring's suspension against the award to Depannage Lybaert of the South-East towing lot, because the additional information the contracting authority requested on staff, premises and intervention vehicles did not fall under the strict regularisation rules for offers, but under the more lenient rules for requesting evidence of technical capacity.
'We are the largest sand trader in the Netherlands' is not a price justification
The Council of State rejects Hye-Boskalis' extreme-urgency challenge against the award of the Zandvliet waiting dock to Herbosch-Kiere–Hens: negative unit prices of -€4 and -€5 per m³ for the disposal of dredged sand cannot be substantiated with Boskalis' market position and a single comparison contract from another project — when you deviate sharply from the estimate AND from the competitors, your justification must be cost-component-by-cost-component, not story-by-company.
The contracting authority that would have 'rescued' Flowbird with a question would have breached the equal treatment principle itself
The Council of State rejects Flowbird's extreme-urgency challenge against Parking Brussels' award to Be-Mobile of the Business Rules Engine contract: a 'technical note' of five pages required on pain of nullity cannot be replaced by a 114-page Technical Memorandum or a 14-page Helicopter Vision — and the contracting authority would have been wrong to ask Flowbird about it.
Before filing an extreme-urgency action, do the maths: AGA challenged 3.06 points across six questions while the total gap was 3.24
The Council of State rejects AGA's extreme-urgency action against the award to Modero of an eight-year framework for bailiff services to the city of Antwerp, because its complaints about the page limit, the demo duration and the motivation are either factually wrong or — for the motivation challenge — leave AGA without sufficient interest: the contested points cannot bridge the total score gap.
A concession with no written criteria can still be annulled four years later — even when the defendant doesn't bother to fight back
The Council of State annuls, via the abbreviated procedure, two decisions of the City of Dinant distributing quays and boat moorings on the Meuse between tourist boat operators, because no selection criterion or reason was ever formulated — and the City didn't even ask the procedure to continue.
The winner built the very quality framework the tender relies on — and that alone is not a reason to exclude them
The Council of State refuses, in extreme urgency, to suspend an award where the winning bidder (IPSO) had previously drawn up the quality reference framework and supporting database that the new tender re-used — because the applicant could not concretely demonstrate a competitive advantage.
Hide your previous terminated contract and you lose the next one too — even if you're contesting that termination in court
The Council of State refuses to suspend the exclusion of an architectural firm by social housing company Toit & Moi based on an earlier contract terminated by another contracting authority (La Sambrienne), holding that the firm should have spontaneously disclosed the termination in its bid and submitted self-cleaning measures — even though it is contesting the termination itself before the ordinary courts.
A reference 'does not belong to the candidate' — that line alone is not enough to exclude a firm relying on its founder's past role
The Council of State suspends the City of Tournai's non-selection of architecture firm SEA for the passerelle de l'Arche tender because the motivation — two references (La Belle Liégeoise, l'Enjambée in Namur) are in Greisch's name and therefore do not belong to SEA — does not allow verification whether the City held that founder V.S. cannot rely on those references, or that SEA cannot rely on the professional experience acquired by one of its founders at another firm.
A payslip does not prove where your worker lives — and without that home address, your 25-minute response time falls apart
The Council of State rejects Aquastructo's suspension request against its exclusion for unjustified abnormally low prices in the road-salting and snow-clearing tender for the Aarschot district, because the payslips Aquastructo submitted to evidence its short response times only state the place of employment — not the home addresses of the workers from which the claimed central location would have to be inferred.
Schrems II does not automatically make any award to a US cloud partner irregular — if the DPO has analysed the data flow concretely, the award stands
The Council of State rejects the second suspension request against the award of the Flemish Mobility Centre to ViaVan (subsidiary of a US parent, using AWS) because, after a first suspension, the Flemish Region extended its motivation with a concrete review by its Data Protection Officer, and the bidders' contention that no supplementary GDPR measure could ever cure the situation — not even encryption with key control retained in-house — is not credible.
Awarding 'excellent' because a bid is better in 'at least 3 domains' — without ever saying which 3 — costs the award
The Council of State suspends Defence's award of the multi-year green-maintenance contract for the Florennes military zone to Krinkels because the formal motivation lists qualitative strengths per bidder but does not allow verification that the score 'excellent' (reserved for offers better than the others in at least 3 domains) was actually attributed in line with the announced evaluation method.
Challenging a tender as 'tailor-made for incumbent X' fails when the harm comes from a clause you did not actually attack
The Council of State rejects routing-services provider Easypost's suspension request against the IPFBW postal-services tender because the alleged harm in fact stems from the broader requirement that affiliated entities pre-frank their own mail — a requirement Easypost did not actually challenge — rather than from the cumulative obligation to offer two franking methods (stamp + franking machine) that it did challenge.
Repeating a price is not justifying it — the City of Kortrijk loses its four-year HVAC framework agreement
The Council of State annuls the City of Kortrijk's award to Vergote bvba because the city accepted a 'price justification' that consisted merely of a repetition of the offered price — a fixed hourly rate of 45 EUR (21.19 % below the average) was justified with the sentence 'our standard rate is 47 €/h for private clients, because we can deploy someone full-time on this project we can apply 45 €/h'.
Lowest tariff, best price — and lost anyway: how four small minus points cost a 10-year bicycle-sharing concession
The Council of State dismisses Marfina's extreme-urgency suspension against the award of the Antwerp bike-sharing concession to Donkey Republic — Marfina won on price and on tariff, but lost 14 points on quality because of an accumulation of details (a coaster brake that did not exist, a maintenance app not available in Dutch, a vague description of a social-employment partner) that each looked minor in isolation.
Replacing the tender's templates with your own is allowed — provided every colour in your legend is defined and every frequency is linked to a specific cleaning task
The Belgian Council of State dismisses the extreme-urgency suspension filed by cleaning company Misanet against the award of the cleaning contract for the Mechelen police complex to Care: Misanet had not filled in the mandatory tables 1-9 for the cleaning regime but had replaced them with its own colour-coded tables, and had failed to define a frequency for the colour white while certain rooms (sanitary facilities, cell complex) required a daily regime — substantial irregularity confirmed.
'Clarifying' a signature mandate after the opening can be done — but if the award decision is silent about what you received, you lose the award
The Belgian Council of State suspends Defence's award of a VSAT satellite housing to Metracom because, although the mandate of the signatory had been 'clarified' after the opening of bids, the award decision did not explain what documents were received — and those documents appeared to contradict an earlier 'acte de désignation du signataire' filed by Metracom in a previous proceeding.
You won the first suspension — and you think the contracting authority is now obliged to award to you? The opposite can happen: in round two you fall out on irregularities
The Council of State rejects Fire Technics's second urgent suspension request against the Hainaut-Centre rescue zone: after a successful first suspension in February 2020, the contracting authority may withdraw its decision and issue a new award decision in which Fire Technics's bid is excluded for substantial irregularities — even if that bid was found regular in the first round.
Three Infliximab bids ranging from €68.89 to €405.22 — and your motivation reads 'two are generics'? That's a 'gross error' that brings the award down
The Council of State suspends the award to Sandoz of an Infliximab framework agreement for the CHR de la Citadelle hospital because the contracting authority wrongly classified the two cheapest offers as 'generics' while they were in fact 'biosimilars' — a substantive distinction that should have underpinned the price justification of an 80% price gap.
A 'loose list of grievances' is not a ground — an urgent suspension petition cannot be repaired later through a reply note
The Council of State rejects Frontforce's urgent suspension request against the award of dispatching software by the Flemish Brabant West rescue zone to Verdi: a petition that merely lists points without explaining why a recalculation would change the ranking does not meet the structure and specificity requirements — and what is missing in the petition cannot be added via a reply note.
96 parking spaces against a requirement of 100 is not a substantial irregularity — and a 6.5% architect fee is not abnormal, even when 27% below the runner-up
The Council of State rejects D E Architecten's urgent suspension request against the award to M4 Architecten of a study contract for a local service centre and child-care facility in Sint-Pieters-Leeuw: a bid with 4 parking spaces fewer than required and a fee of 6.5% (against 8.25% for the second-best) is not substantially irregular in this context — and the price examination needs no explicit motivation as long as the contracting authority finds no appearance of abnormality.
A 'final' email from a Category Buyer can amount to a challengeable exclusion decision — even when the author was not authorised to take it
The Council of State suspends the exclusion of AGC Glass from the SNCB tender for M6 train window frames because the email by which a Category Buyer 'definitively' rejected the bid does constitute a challengeable administrative decision — but was taken by someone who, as SNCB itself admits, lacked the authority, leading the Council to suspend on an ex officio ground.
One abnormal unit price knocks your whole bid out of the race — even if your total amount looks competitive
The Council of State rejects De Vriese's urgent suspension request against the award of bicycle-path maintenance in Ostend to Adiel Maes (€635,072.36): bidders who limit their price justification to a breakdown of activities, or to a reference to their subcontractor's offer, risk having their bid declared irregular on a single item — losing the entire contract.
A price justification rejected in a first procedure cannot be recycled in the next — not even when the price has since been 'adjusted'
The Council of State suspends the award of the urban renewal works in Charleroi (€30.1 million excl. VAT) because the city relied, for a suspiciously high unit price of the winning bid, on a price justification it had itself rejected as unacceptable in an earlier procedure — while the price had since been 'adjusted' without any new inquiry.
A commitment letter from your parent company is NOT a formality — leave it out of your application and you lose the contract, even after four years of proceedings
The Council of State rejects Chantiers Allais's urgent suspension request against its non-selection for the river patrol boats: any candidate relying on the financial capacity of its parent company must include a formal commitment letter from that parent in its application — group affiliation does not suffice, and post-deadline supplements are worthless, even when the contracting authority initially missed the flaw.
A two-phase bid where phase 1 fails the minimum requirements is simply irregular — phase 2 will not save you, however brilliant
The Council of State rejects French supplier TONWELT's urgent suspension request against the award of multimedia devices to TAPART: even openly disclosing that your first delivery has a screen smaller than the specifications require (4.3 instead of 4.5 inches) is a substantial irregularity that voids your entire bid — a phase 2 with a 6.3-inch screen in 2020 does not cure it.
If you don't request continuation after a suspension, your decision is annulled automatically — AGB Deinze let its theatre-seats award be annulled without a fight
AGB Deinze tried to award a sub-lot for theatre seats as 'additional works' to the main contractor Strabag, was suspended in October 2019, and three months later saw the entire award annulled because it failed to request continuation of the proceedings.
An award criterion pointing to a specifications article that doesn't exist, plus headline scores with no breakdown — Villers-la-Ville loses its cleaning tender on a misapplied 30-point criterion
The Council of State suspends the cleaning contract awarded by Villers-la-Ville because the third award criterion ('management and emergency interventions', 30 points) refers to an article 3.1 of the specifications that simply doesn't exist — and the authority gives identical 25/30 scores to bids with manifestly different quality.
Sorting in Lokeren counts as 'processing', pre-treatment in Hamme doesn't — Verko's own contradiction suspends the award
Verko unilaterally moved Van Werven's 'processing site' from Hamme (8.6 km) to Lanaken (149 km), wiping out 20 environmental points — but accepted Renewi's sorting as 'processing'; that asymmetric reading sinks the award.
‘Material aid’ as an award criterion for textile collection: what happens to the collected textile after pickup still counts as ‘link with the subject of the contract’
The Council of State dismisses Recutex-Victrans’s challenge against the award to Televil because a social award criterion that measures how much collected textile a bidder makes available for poverty relief does have a sufficient link with the public contract — it forms part of the final stage of the processing chain, and in a reserved contract for social-economy operators it measures the quality of the service itself.
'Clustering' unit prices across three related items is allowed — Middelkerke keeps its €685,683 award to Penninck
Norré-Behaegel argued that the winner had priced all the labour into a single item and left the other two empty, but the Council of State accepts 'clustering' of unit prices across related items as long as the contractor backs up the productivity figures with concrete data and invoices.
No supporting documents, no defence: a contracting authority that cannot justify its accreditation requirement sees the award suspended
The Council of State suspends — under extreme urgency — the award of lot 2 because EV-ILVO submits no document explaining why the electrical and data works fall under accreditation sub-category P1 rather than P2, while RDR Infra demonstrates with a meticulous four-page table that the bulk of the works actually sits under P2.
A price justification that combines the Bureau des Prix estimate with the requested unit-price justifications suffices, even if the analysis covers less than two thirds of the offer amount
The Council of State rejects the annulment of the award to Colas Belgium for the E411 rehabilitation (€8.89m), because a contracting authority that bases its price examination on a Bureau des Prix estimate combined with reasoned justifications of certain unit prices it queried with the bidder satisfies its examination and motivation duty — even if that analysis covers less than two thirds of the offer amount.
Switching to the intercommunal entity after the bids have come in — then you must have actually compared the prices, and that comparison must show in the file
The Council of State suspends the decision of Morlanwelz to halt the award of eighteen waste lots and continue cooperation with the intercommunal HYGEA, because the reasoning ('the offered conditions are not sufficiently interesting compared to what HYGEA can offer') is a boilerplate clause that leaves no trace of an actual price comparison.
Forgot the ESPD? There's no way back — even if the tender documents stay silent on the sanction
The Council of State confirms that omitting a European Single Procurement Document (ESPD/UEA) from a bid automatically renders the bid substantially irregular — even when neither the tender documents nor the information session mention that consequence.
When your own counsel can't explain your own document: how Limburg.net lost its bin-bag award
The Council of State suspends the award by waste utility Limburg.net to Sphere Belgium because applying the price formula is not the same as the legally required price examination — a defect that became obvious when the contracting authority's counsel admitted at the hearing that he could not explain his own document.
You can't 'tailor' the gap-filling formula to save your preferred bidder
The Council of State suspends the award of the Boom artificial turf contract because AGB Plus replaced the gap-filling formula of article 86, §2 of the Royal Decree on Award with its own variant — and didn't even establish that all bidders understood item 71 the same way.
One office outside the service area: that's not a hidden sub-criterion, it's just less accessibility
The Council of State dismisses the application of a lawyer partnership that lost the Pidpa debt-collection contract — taking into account the spread of offices within the service area is not a hidden sub-criterion but a legitimate reading of 'accessibility for customers'.
Between 'incorrect statement' and 'gravely false statement' there is a motivation gap the contracting authority must fill
The Council of State annuls the exclusion of a cleaning company on the ground of 'gravely false statements' (article 61, §2, 7° of the 2011 Royal Decree) because the Walloon Region had only established that the bidder's environmental management evidence did not meet the requirements — never explaining where the 'gravity' lay.
If you ask before the deadline whether your certificate is good enough, a 'no' on paper is hard to challenge later
The Council of State dismisses an extreme-urgency suspension by a window installer who was excluded because his ATG and ISO 9001 did not match a specific quality-label requirement in the specification — precisely because he had asked the question himself six weeks earlier and received a written 'no', he could no longer invoke a defective statement of reasons.
'Yes' on the bid form and 'no' on the ESPD: not a calculation error, but a ground for exclusion
Dockx Movers lost its extreme-urgency challenge against Artesis Plantijn Hogeschool because it ticked 'yes' to subcontracting on the bid form but twice answered 'no' in the attached ESPD — a contradiction the Council qualifies as a substantial irregularity that can no longer be cured under article 34 of the Royal Decree of 18 April 2017.
Writing 'we think 13 to 16 FTE would be good' to a bidder who has 5 is not clarification — it's coaching
The Brussels Region awarded the Collecto night-taxi concession to newcomer Victor Cab, which had only 5 FTEs at offer opening, after the Region wrote that 13 to 16 FTEs 'would be a good approach' and even suggested how (article 60, interns, students) — the Council of State suspends because this falls far outside what article 48, §3 of the concession law allows.
If your tender writes 'no negotiation if the winner stands out', then 1.4 points out of 100 is not standing out
AIVE wrote in the tender that it would skip negotiation if the top-ranked offer 'stood out' from the others — then awarded directly to Van Wingen, 1.4 points ahead of Bergerat Monnoyeur, without even explaining why that counted as standing out. The Council of State suspends.
An award criterion is not there to check who meets the spec, but to identify who meets it BEST
The Walloon water utility (SWDE) awarded an 11.6 million euro sludge-treatment contract to SEDE/ATOX based on reasoning like 'sufficient qualified staff' and 'clearly identified resources' — the Council of State suspends because such formulas verify whether bidders meet requirements rather than rank who meets them best.
The same fact can weigh on two award criteria — as long as those criteria measure genuinely different things
Alinea Interieurarchitectuur claimed it was 'sanctioned twice' for the Flemish House in London project because its lack of international experience cost points on both 'design team' and 'references' — the Council of State replies dryly that this is not a double sanction, but the same factor being relevant for two distinct assessments.
A cleaning rate of EUR 20.49 per hour cannot be brushed away with 'we know that company from the previous contract'
Hogeschool PXL awarded a four-year cleaning contract to Köse Cleaning at 30 % below the average bid price without any documented price scrutiny — the Council of State annuls the award because in a fraud-sensitive sector like cleaning, the contracting authority must also verify whether the minimum wage is achievable.
EUR 1,904 for one metre of pipe is obviously wrong — but 'we took the average of the competitors' is not a valid correction
The Province of Hainaut corrected one unit price in ENVISYS's bid from EUR 1,904.40/m to the average of the other bidders (EUR 26.30/m), bumping ENVISYS from fourth to first place — the Council of State suspends the award because the average of competitors does not prove what ENVISYS actually intended.
Opening half an hour too early costs FILBOIS eight lots — 'we always did it that way' is no longer a defence under the new Royal Decree
INTRADEL excludes long-time partner FILBOIS from all 8 lots for wood-waste processing because its facility opens and closes half an hour outside the specifications — the Council of State confirms: when the tender documents say 'essential', they mean essential, even if the same hours were accepted in previous years.
An irregular bidder gets only the extract on its own exclusion – not the award decision behind the winner
Heyrman-De Roeck is excluded for an unaccepted price justification and wants to scrutinise the price justification of the winner – who won with a price 100,000 euros higher – but the Council of State explains that the law of 17 June 2013 only entitles an irregular bidder to an extract setting out the grounds for its own exclusion, and that scrutiny of abnormally HIGH prices may anyway be more lenient than scrutiny of abnormally LOW prices.
A contracting authority may keep the price justification confidential — but must show that it actually examined it
ISPPC awarded a debt-recovery contract to VENTURIS at €1.98 per file — twice cheaper than the runner-up and three times cheaper than the field average of €1,438,448 — but the award decision nowhere explained why the price justification was convincing, and the Council of State suspends.
Four years of competitive dialogue stopped — and the Council says: one solid reason is enough, here there were two
After four years of competitive dialogue over a GFT processing plant Verko stops the procedure on four grounds — the Council of State holds that the lack of competition (one regular offer left) and the major budget overrun (€31m against an estimate of €13.6m) on their own already support the cancellation, regardless of whether the other two grounds are correct.
Negotiating below the €30k threshold is allowed, but not with one bidder alone — even if that bidder doesn't change its price
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre asked only the French winner whether it would deliver 36 instead of 24 anti-truck barriers at the same unit price, without asking PITAGONE the same — the Council of State suspends, even though the winner kept its price unchanged.
One disabled worker out of two is exactly half — and half is not a majority
Groenservice Marissen was the cheapest bidder on a contract reserved for sheltered workshops in Schoten, but was excluded because it could not show that a majority of its workers — or even of the two workers it would actually deploy on site — were disabled; the Council of State dismisses the appeal.
Move a comma one position too far and end up €379,000 above the market — and you can't blame the contracting authority later
Renotec quoted a unit price in thousands instead of hundreds for the temporary signage on the Zelzate tunnel — €379,000, or 15% of its entire bid — and demanded that AWV correct this 'obvious material error'; the Council of State refuses, because the error was not 'apparent' and both the numeric and written-out price showed the same wrong figure.
A 'purely material error' is not just any error — if the contracting authority must guess to correct it, it falls outside article 96 §1
Veolia had wrongly allocated biomass cogeneration costs to the central boiler in its offer for the ULiège HVAC maintenance contract; the Council of State holds that such a misallocation is not a 'purely material error' when the contracting authority cannot redistribute without speculation — the extreme-urgency suspension is rejected, Cofely keeps the contract.
A remark in your offer about delivery times or revisions doesn't automatically make it irregular — provided the specifications allow it and your opponent can't link it to the award criterion
Ghent University awarded the €8.5 million Capture new-build to Cordeel-Imtech despite two remarks in their offer (longer delivery times for reinforcement plans and €100/hour from the third revision of production drawings); the Council of State rejects Wyckaert/SPIE's challenge because the specifications do not exclude the remarks and the applicants cannot directly link the alleged competitive advantage to the sole award criterion — price.
Rejecting an offer 35% above your budget as 'unacceptable' is not an irregularity — certainly not when that budget was nowhere in the tender documents
The City of Antwerp rejected Antwerp Recycling Company's offer as irregular because the total price was 35% above the available budget, without mentioning that budget in the tender documents and without price questioning — the Council of State suspends the award to Bruco Containers for breach of the price examination regime under the 2017 Award Royal Decree.
Once you require a bank declaration in the tender, you must enforce it — otherwise your award decision is empty motivation
The Council of State annuls the award to AGS Coussaert of lot 6 (diplomatic packing) of a five-year framework agreement of the Belgian Foreign Ministry: the award decision contained no motivation for accepting an offer without the bank declaration and without the ISPM15 and SEI/HPE certificates expressly required by the specifications, while the report simultaneously denied and confirmed that offer's regularity.
It's the authority's job to send you the full motivation — not yours to request it
The Council of State suspends the award of a stucco-restoration contract at Gaasbeek Castle because the award report was sent with redacted figures and assessments — with only one point separating winner and runner-up.
Suspension won, award withdrawn, appeal dismissed — and still EUR 1,240 in costs for the city
The City of Brussels lost the suspension procedure against Buggenhouts Tegelhuis in March 2017, filed no continuation request after the auditor proposed annulment, and then withdrew its own award decision — result: the appeal is dismissed as 'without object' but the city pays EUR 1,240 in costs.
'Impossible to assess' is no motivation when the file contains all the data
The Council of State annuls a Brussels rejection for the second time because the selection jury refused to perform the analysis prescribed by its own call for tenders — even though the Council itself shows it could be done, on the very same file.
Accepting an 'abnormally high' price is permitted under softer rules than rejecting an 'abnormally low' one
The Belgian Council of State dismisses the appeal against the award to Van Wellen for the structural maintenance of the E19, and explicitly establishes for the first time that an examination of abnormally HIGH prices is fundamentally different from an examination of abnormally low prices — the contracting authority may take a softer stance on accepting price justifications, and the grounds in art. 36 §3 of the Royal Decree of 18 April 2017 are not exhaustive.
RENEWI's price went up by EUR 113,000 after 'correction' — and the file does not say how
The Belgian Council of State suspends the award of a 4-year waste management contract to RENEWI because CHR Citadelle did motivate why a correction was needed but never explained how the price was actually recalculated — and without those calculation details, a 'rectification' of EUR 113,000 may in reality be a new price offer.
Demanding insurance of 3× your tender price is allowed — the '2× rule' from the directive only applies to turnover
The Belgian Council of State dismisses FALCO's appeal and confirms that a contracting authority may require bidders' professional liability insurance to cover at least 3× the tender amount — the proportionality rule that applies to minimum-turnover requirements (max 2× the estimated contract value) is not transposable to insurance guarantees.
'Spontaneously' correcting a bid upward by 40% is allowed — provided the contracting authority explains why it is not a new offer
The Council of State suspends the award of a public works contract to LECOMTE because the municipality of Meix-devant-Virton accepted that LECOMTE corrected its bid after opening from EUR 119,973 to EUR 167,628 — an increase of nearly 40% — without any single word in the award decision explaining why this qualified as a correctable error rather than a modification of the bid.
You can complain about the absence of a price check even if you submitted the lowest bid — and a comparative price table is not a price check
The Council of State suspends the award to Malysse of a framework contract for the rental and maintenance of workwear for VIVALIA because the administrative file nowhere shows that the contracting authority carried out an effective price check, and rules that even Servitex — the lowest bidder — has standing for this plea.
If you trail by 8.01 points and can recover at most 8, you don't even get a substantive ruling
The Council of State rejects Conceptexpo's suspension request against the award to Potteau for a furniture contract for the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences because, even if all challenged points were corrected in its favour (gaining 5 points itself, removing 3 from Potteau), it would still finish 0.01 points behind the winner — and a plea with no possible impact on the ranking is no plea.
Family business, simple project, lower recognition class, nearby sites — four soft arguments together suffice to justify an abnormally low price
The Council of State rejects Swinnen's suspension request against the award to the family contractor Nelis for a youth meeting centre in Zaventem, confirming that a contracting authority may accept a price justification based on non-numerical arguments — such as a family structure, a simple project and synergy through proximity — provided those elements are plausible and reasonable when read together.
If you say you verified the prices, you must be able to prove it with documents in your file — otherwise the verification has not been established
The Council of State suspends, for the second time, the same award decision by the Brussels Region for a six-building cleaning contract, because the Region had neither preserved any trace of price verification for Köse Cleaning in its administrative file, nor could explain why an 'exceptional' use of student workers was suddenly accepted as a structural price justification for the winner Jette Clean.
A 'side note' attached to a tender is not innocuous — if the contracting authority does not examine its impact, the award falls
The Council of State suspends the award to Aannemingen Van Wellen for the structural maintenance of the E19 North motorway, because the Flemish Region did not examine in its decision whether a separate note from the winner — proposing changes to the assumed quantities of three items — undermined the certainty of its contractual commitment.
Giving everyone a perfect score is not an evaluation — and a tennis court contract falls under sub-category G4, not G
The Council of State suspends the award of a contract for two clay tennis courts in Herzele to Sportsbuild, because the municipality de facto neutralised two of its three award criteria by giving every bidder the maximum score, and because the contract fell under sub-category G4 — meaning that classification of the contractor was required, which the winner did not have.
'We meet all the requirements' is not a legal ground — an extreme-urgency petition must cite specific articles
The Council of State rejects PanStreet's appeal due to inadmissible legal grounds: vague claims that 'specifications were not respected' without reference to specific provisions of the specifications or which deviations were wrongly accepted do not meet the formal requirements of an extreme-urgency petition.
Submitting no ISO certificate? You don't need to prove why you couldn't get one
The Council of State rejects Sodexo's appeal: a tenderer who does not submit a quality certificate and instead provides 'equivalent measures' implicitly proves that the certificate could not be obtained in time — no separate 'negative' burden of proof is required.
Refusing the government commissioner's visa is no detail — it can flip the entire ranking, and that's allowed
The Council of State rejects the extreme urgency challenge against the award of an orthopedic concession at Ghent University Hospital: after the government commissioner refused his visa on the first award report, the authority could re-evaluate, swapping the winner (V!GO) and runner-up (Aqtor!) — without the commissioner exceeding his powers.
The price on the bid form and the price in the award report differed by 60,000 euros — and nobody explained why
The Council rejects Monument Vandekerckhove's appeal against the award to PPR-Vibed (€1,752,813), but rules that the duty to state reasons was breached because the contracting authority failed to explain why PPR-Vibed's price in the award report was suddenly €59,469 lower than at the opening session — and orders the Flemish Community to pay costs.
Two bidders, both lacking the required certificates — yet the rejected bidder still has standing to seek suspension
The Council suspends the award to AGS Coussaert of lot 6 (packaging of diplomatic cargo) of the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs: both the absence of an explicitly required bank statement and of two explicitly required certificates (ISPM15 and SEI/HPE) in the winning bid were left unmotivated in the award decision — and the contracting authority cannot hide behind the fact that BKSI's own bid was also incomplete, because with two bidders BKSI gets a new award opportunity if both are rejected.
A radiation-shielding block estimated at €800/m³ when it costs €5,000 on the market — two years after the suspension was rejected, the €47.8m Jules Bordet award is annulled
The Council of State annuls the award of the structural-shell lot for the new Jules Bordet Institute to the temporary association CFE-Blaton-Entreprises Louis De Waele (€47.8 million) because the contracting authority accepted a unit price of €1,163/m³ for a radiation-shielding block that the market sells at around €5,000/m³ — the benchmark used (a prior estimate of €800/m³) rested on a misreading of a Veritas quote as if it included 357 invisible tons of lead.
A bid 31% below the average survives price scrutiny thanks to a single 32-page annex
Stadsbader bid 31% below the average for an Infrabel rail works contract — and survived price scrutiny because they spontaneously included a detailed calculation of their ten largest line items, six of which actually proved more expensive than the complaining competitor's.
If you only attack your own exclusion and leave the higher-ranked bidders alone, you have no interest left
The Council of State rejects Ethias's extreme-urgency application against its exclusion in a Federal Pension Service hospital-insurance tender without ruling on the merits — Ethias was not the lowest bidder for any lot and did not raise any ground against the regularity of the higher-ranked AXA and AG Insurance, so even a winning application could never have got it the contract.
Failing to compare yourself with the winners loses your case
The Council of State rejects an extreme-urgency application by an architect joint venture against Ghent University's selection of five other study teams for a €29.6 million student housing project — not because the reasoning was flawless, but because the petitioners nowhere concretely show why the five selected were not better than they.
A contracting authority that changes its mind only has to motivate the NEW position — not defend the old one
The Brussels-Capital Region invited Orange into a negotiated procedure without prior publication on the ground of exclusivity, received its BAFO, and then decided to abort the procedure because 'other operators can also handle this' — the Council of State upheld that about-face: a changed position only requires reasoning of the NOW, not an explanation of the THEN.
Two grounds for exclusion? One weak link can break the whole decision
The Council of State suspends the award of shower-renovation works to RECO+ because the Communauté française excluded VAEL on a combination of a tax debt that the tax administration itself had repeatedly denied existed, and a Social Security debt that did stand up — but without saying that either ground sufficed on its own, the weakest link drags the whole decision down.
If you ask one bidder to clarify an 'abnormal' offer, you must ask every bidder with the same ambiguity — selective questioning is unequal treatment
The Council of State suspends a Brussels Environment Institute award because only Oneliner was questioned about its 'abnormally high' translation volumes, while another selected bidder had explicitly not committed in its own offer either — selective questioning over an ambiguous tender clause is unequal treatment of bidders.
You can't explain away unit prices that are 81% above and 68% below the average by saying 'the total price is normal'
The Council of State suspends the award of a demolition and new-build contract in Lommel because the city had not investigated unit prices ranging from 81% above to 68% below the average — a 'normal' total price and a vague reference to 'clustering' between items cannot replace that investigation.
A turnover requirement of fifty times the contract value is striking — but if one valid exclusion ground holds, the appeal does not fly
The Council of State rejects VR Conteneur's extreme-urgency action against Intradel: even if the requirement of €10 million annual turnover for a contract worth €200,000 is debatable, the non-selection also rests on the absence of a welding robot — a requirement Intradel was entitled to set — and the awardee ANG could rely on its Polish subsidiary's consolidated turnover under article 74 RD 15/07/2011.
The same degressive percentage does not automatically apply to every award criterion — read where weighting per item exists
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency action of Moments Furniture, which argued that Vivalia should also have applied the degressive percentages (100%, 70%, 40%...) globally to the 'technical aspects' criterion of 45 points — whereas the specifications applied those percentages only item by item, because there was a separate weighting per item in column D of the inventory.
Want one project to count as a reference for every discipline? Say so in your application — not at the Council of State
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency action of an architectural firm that only afterwards claimed that its single restoration reference 't Schaliken was actually meant as a reference for architecture, technical studies and stability as well — while the city of Oudenburg had asked for four separate references in the call for applications and the firm's own application maintained that distinction.
Cheapest bid (€42,350), 40/40 on price — and still loses, because the work plan didn't spell out the 'obvious' tender requirements
The Council of State rejects Abesim's extreme-urgency suspension, the lowest bidder for an OVAM phytoremediation study: it scored a perfect 40/40 on price (€42,350 vs €77,755 for the winner) but lost so heavily on quality that OVAM was entitled to award the contract to the more expensive consortium of UHasselt-Bio2clean-Arcadis-Witteveen+Bos.
If you know the auditor finds your winner's permit unlawful, you cannot rush the award — even under the presumption of legality
The Council of State suspends the Port of Antwerp's award of 8 million euro of dredging works in the 4th dock to Martens & Van Oord, because the Port — despite known auditor reports finding the crucial OVAM permit unlawful — did not wait for the Council's ruling before proceeding.
A publication error in the Belgian Official Gazette ('annual meeting' instead of 'board of directors') does not invalidate an offer — what counts is the actual mandate
The Council of State refuses to suspend the City of Aalst's award of 5.2 million euros of sewerage works to the joint venture Audenaert-Audebo, because an erroneously drafted Official Gazette extract does not undo the fact that Samuel Auquier's power of attorney had been granted — by the competent body, the board of directors of Audebo NV — long before the offer was filed.
A specification you didn't label 'essential'? That doesn't give you a free pass to ignore it at award time
The Council of State suspended the award of a towing contract because the police zone knew the winning towing service did not comply with the spec requiring premises inside the zone, and never motivated in the award decision why that requirement had suddenly become non-essential.
An uninvited bidder who still submits an offer can win — below the EU threshold a spontaneous bid is fair game
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award of the gym-floor renovation in De Alk because the Municipality of Alken, after severe flooding, could legitimately use the urgent procedure via the college of mayor and aldermen, and because a spontaneous bid from a non-invited company in a negotiated procedure without publication below the EU threshold may be considered.
Ask the contracting authority to justify your price — and they discover where your offer doesn't match the specifications
ENERGYS, ranked first with the lowest offer for the HVAC of the Iris-Sud hospital, is declared irregular for abnormally low prices — and the Council of State refuses to suspend because its own price justification revealed it had not bid on all technical specifications.
Arguing the specs were written for a competitor? Then your own bid had better not contradict that claim
The Council of State rejects Vita Nova Supra's suspension of the award of a five-year AED supply contract to Half Blue: a bidder who claims the tender specs are tailored to one product cannot simultaneously state in its own offer that it weighed that very product and chose to bid a different one.
A bidder admits its own price doesn't add up — you cannot then award 'as submitted' without a reasoned answer to the question whether that price is still normal
POM Antwerpen could not push through the award of a 7.8-million-euro infrastructure contract to Deckx after Deckx itself, one month after opening, admitted in writing that its unit prices for water-retaining sheet piling did not include the purchase or depreciation of the steel sheets — because the award report nowhere reasoned why those self-confessed low prices were nevertheless normal.
A forgotten methodology document is not an 'arithmetic error' — even when the contracting authority already knows the content
The lowest bidder received 0/10 for technical centre maintenance because the methodology document was missing; the Council of State refuses to qualify this as a material error and confirms that regularisation would alter the offer — which is forbidden.
A contracting authority that secretly factors budget allocation into a methodology criterion rewrites its own specifications — and gets suspended
The Walloon Region scored the methodological award criteria partly on the basis of budget allocation and person-days that were nowhere announced as criteria in the specifications; the Council of State suspends the award because this modifies the criterion a posteriori or makes it unforeseeable.
Two valid scoring errors in your offer count for nothing if the points gap remains too wide to close
Besix Park persuades the Council of State on two scoring errors — three wrongly deducted points on award criterion 1 and a possibly understated score on criterion 4 — but loses anyway, because even after correction 82.24 points cannot catch Apcoa's 90.
Maintenance during the warranty period is not a 'service contract' — Skoda eliminated for 175 MIVB trams
The Council of State rejects Skoda's extreme-urgency suspension against its non-selection for the MIVB framework agreement for 175 trams: Skoda's satisfaction certificates concerned the supply and warranty-period service, while the third selection criterion required a reference to a separate service contract on life-cycle management — two different things that Skoda had bundled into one.
The specification asked for a birthday menu, the bid promised 'a culinary attention': one point less, contract lost
The Council of State rejects Compass Group's suspension request against OCMW Tervuren's award of lot 1 (hot meals) to ISS — at a difference of only 1.10 point between the two offers, small substantive deviations in the bid wording (a 'culinary attention' instead of the birthday menu required by the specifications, a thin treatment of ethnic diversity) fully justify why Compass loses two points on the quality criterion.
One reviewer does 80% of the hours in a 'college of two': no problem according to the Council of State
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency suspension against FOREM's re-award to KPMG/Joiris, even though one signing reviewer would perform 584 of the 730 'reviewer hours' — the requirement of a 'college of reviewers' is assessed at the firm level, not at the level of the individual signing reviewers.
Press coverage of fraud at your competitor isn't enough to have them excluded — the contracting authority needs concrete proof
The Council of State rejects Alfa-Zet Systems' extreme-urgency suspension request against the award of the Fedorest cash-register contract to Euro-Tap-Control-Verkoop, because a fraud investigation reported in the press without concrete criminal-law evidence does not establish a 'serious professional misconduct' under article 61, §2, 4° of the Royal Decree on Procurement.
'The prices are confidential' is not a valid reason to redact them from an award decision
The Council of State suspends the award to Witteveen+Bos of an ecological restoration contract, because the Flemish Region had redacted both the bid prices and the score per award criterion from the award report it sent — leaving only total scores — and because handing the unredacted version over later does not cure that lack of formal motivation.
The lowest bidder loses a €105,982 school renovation because seven mandatory documents were missing — and the specifications offered no second chance
The Council of State dismisses the suspension request against the award of the renovation of the KA Berchem classrooms to Creative Resin Solutions for €105,982.08: the fact that the contracting authority allowed the winner to add a missing reference list but not Verboven-Reynders does not breach the principle of equal treatment — a bidder who omitted seven mandatory selection documents is not in a 'comparable situation' to one who only missed a single formality.
The National Lottery claims it withdrew the award decision itself — but without proof, the Council of State annulled anyway
After a suspension in extreme urgency the National Lottery let the 30-day window to request continuation of the procedure expire unused, later claimed the award decision had been 'withdrawn' but produced no document evidencing that — result: the Council of State annulled the decision for the sake of legal certainty.
Letting a suspended contract run on — and refusing to file an administrative file 'for security reasons'? The Council of State suspends again, without any balance of interests
After the Council of State on 1 February 2016 suspended the award of the WTC III guarding contract to H-SECURITE, the Belgian State simply let the same service provider continue and refused to disclose any administrative file on the 'new' period — result: a second suspension in four weeks, with the applicant's facts accepted as proven and no vague 'safety of asylum seekers' balance to offset it.
Cutting five 'superfluous' sub-studies from the winning offer to make the price acceptable? That is not correcting a clerical error — that is rewriting the offer
The Council of State suspends the award of the design contract for the redevelopment of municipal buildings in Schoten to Jef Van Oevelen, because the municipality — without any formal procedure and without applying the same exercise to the other bidders — removed five 'unrequested' sub-studies (€96,075.95) from his lump-sum price, thereby lowering Van Oevelen's offer from €506,000 to €409,924 and elevating him to the top of the ranking against what the analysis report showed.
What was first 'insufficient' cannot suddenly become 'satisfactory' without explanation — in the absence of both a minimum threshold and a reasoned assessment, the selection collapses
The Council of State suspends the award of the design/build of a municipal school in Godarville to MIGNONE, because the municipality first found MIGNONE's reference lists insufficient, then without any visible assessment declared after additional information that they were 'satisfactory and sufficient', and in its written observations to the Council brought up — for the first time — five references, three of which had already been in the first list deemed insufficient.
Class 4 is in the specifications, class 3 is not — but you cannot pull such a minimum threshold out of a hat
The Council of State suspends the award to Groenservice of the installation of an artificial-turf football pitch for the municipality of Anderlecht, because the municipality had excluded the lowest bidder BVBA MAB on the basis of an unpublished minimum threshold — references had to exceed €500,000 — that appeared nowhere in the specifications or the notice.
Accepting a 7-year-old town hall reference? Yes, as long as the final acceptance still falls within the three-year window
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency action by architectural firms Alinea Ter and Atelier de l'Arbre d'Or against the award by IDELUX of the project author contract for the Mardasson polyvalent hall in Bastogne, because the reference of the winning team — the Durbuy town hall from 2009 — remains acceptable as long as final acceptance (9 December 2012) falls within the three-year window of article 72, 7° of the Royal Decree of 15 July 2011.
Giving everyone 30 out of 30 for methodology? Then you've switched off your own award criterion
The Council of State suspends the 36-month auditor college contract awarded by FOREM to KPMG–Joiris Rousseaux, because the contracting authority gave all four ranked bidders the maximum score (30/30) on the 'audit approach and planning' criterion without concretely explaining why their methodologies were considered equivalent — even though the gap between the first and third ranked bidder on the other two criteria was only 1.08 points.
If your consulting engineer says 'request a price justification' and you don't — explain why
The Council of State suspends a EUR 4.05 million road-works award because the city of Nieuwpoort dismissed without explanation its own consulting engineer's advice to request a price justification for seven abnormally low unit prices.
Three years of identical works as a subcontractor for the same contracting authority — yet your price is declared 'abnormal' without that fact being assessed
The Council of State annuls the award of motorway maintenance in Flemish Brabant (A-roads West, EUR 450,000) to Deckx Algemene Ondernemingen because the Roads and Traffic Agency dismissed the price of the lowest bidder, Norré-Behaegel (–72.60% discount), as abnormal without addressing its central justification — that it had executed the very same lot for three years as a subcontractor for ABOG at comparable prices.
Strict reference requirement in the call? Then 'OK' and 'who can do more can do less' aren't motivation
The Council of State suspends the award to KONE of the lift lot for the new Jules Bordet Institute, because KONE submitted as its technical-capacity reference the renovation of existing lifts at ZNA Middelheim hospital — while the call for tenders explicitly required a 'rigorously comparable' reference in the context of building a new hospital institution, and the administrative file contained no reasoned trace of why that deviation was acceptable.
An 'amendment' of €270,000 per month to a €4,965-per-month contract isn't an amendment — it's a new contract
The State Secretary for Asylum and Migration signs an 'amendment' to an existing FEDASIL security contract and in reality awards a new contract without publication, without a reasoned award decision, for a different building, at a monthly amount exceeding the entire original contract.
The winner doesn't charge VAT — and the contracting authority believes it without a single document in the file
The Flemish Region awards a contract to a temporary partnership that doesn't charge VAT on most of its bid because of a supposed 'flat-rate agricultural scheme' — but that justification turns out to be factually wrong and rests on no document in the file.
A 2006 conviction used to exclude in 2015 — while the same contracting authority awarded in 2011
Flemish Waterway authority W&Z excludes Heyrman-De Roeck on the basis of a nine-year-old environmental conviction, but fails to explain in its award report why the same conviction was not a problem in 2011 — the Council of State suspends the exclusion for inadequate reasoning.
Same authority, same bidder, same nine-year-old conviction — and a second suspension
On the same day the Council suspends the exclusion of Heyrman-De Roeck under specifications 16EI/15/26, it also suspends a parallel exclusion of the same bidder by the same authority under specifications 16EI/15/71 — for an identical inadequacy of reasoning under the discretionary exclusion ground.
A contracting authority that overrules its own jury must own the deviation — not rewrite the jury
After an initial suspension, the city of Sint-Niklaas gets a green light for a second award to the same bidder because the council may set aside its jury's advice on the second award criterion in a reasoned way — provided the new reasoning stands on its own.
A social security debt is a discretionary exclusion ground — automatic exclusion without a weighing is insufficient reasoning
The Council of State annuls an award because the French-speaking Brussels Parliamentary Assembly excluded cleaning company ACTIVA over social security debts without considering its ongoing repayment plan and a contested rectification debt — and without explaining why it exercised its discretionary exclusion power that way.
Two different discount percentages for the same catalogue = irregular tender — and being right doesn't help if you can't name the law
The Council of State dismisses Centr'Auto's suspension request: its bid for carrosserie tooling was rejected because the discounts on the catalogues differed from those in the dummy order — a self-inflicted inconsistency that prevented price verification — and its plea was partly inadmissible for failing to identify which legal provisions had been breached.
€140,000 over budget and the only bidder: the social welfare centre was allowed to abort and re-tender
The sole bidder for a four-year catering contract came in €140,000 above the estimate — the OCMW Geraardsbergen overrode the favourable recommendation of its own procurement office, stopped the procedure, and the Council of State accepted that decision.
'Negotiated procedure without publication' does not make the tender document optional
A bidder argued that the social welfare centre could not apply the standard rules on irregular tenders in a negotiated procedure — and lost on every front: even without those rules, the authority must apply the tender document it wrote itself.
A red flag in DIGIFLOW is not an exclusion decision — call the tax office before kicking out the lowest bidder
The Council of State suspends in extreme urgency the award decision of BMWB after AIB-Vinçotte — the lowest bidder — was excluded on the basis of a DIGIFLOW certificate contradicted by positive certificates from both before and after the same date.
A price of €0.04 for a demand letter is not a real answer to a price-justification request — accepting it is a manifest error
The Council of State annuls the award of TEC Charleroi's debt-recovery contract: the contracting authority too readily accepted that a €0.04 price per demand letter could be justified by saying letters would be delivered during the bailiffs' regular rounds.
Challenging a points-table gap in the specifications — when your own bid sits in that gap, you lose standing
The Council of State dismisses an extreme-urgency challenge by Dolmans Landscaping against Eandis's awarding of green-maintenance contracts because the specification gap Dolmans attacked — no points for 'exactly 50%' sheltered-workshop capacity — applied to Dolmans itself on the disputed lot, removing its standing.
A 'se réserve le droit' clause is a faculty, not an obligation: the SRWT was not required to mistrust the guaranteed 81,000 km
The Council of State dismisses Michelin's annulment challenge against the awarding of lot 1 of the TEC bus tyre framework to Bridgestone, because the specifications clause 'la SRWT se réserve le droit de corriger ou écarter toute soumission faisant état d'un kilométrage garanti anormal' is a faculty and not an obligation, and Bridgestone's guaranteed 81,000 km — backed by the previous model's average of 79,132 km on the TEC network — is not manifestly unreasonable.
Three pages of approach against seventeen: an offer that refers to the specifications gets 6 out of 40
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award of a contract for the preparation of the Flemish primary-care conference to Möbius, because Ghent University submitted only three pages of offer for the criterion 'quality of the approach plan' — largely cross-references to the specifications — while Möbius delivered seventeen pages of detailed methodology, making 6 out of 40 versus 40 out of 40 a defensible point allocation.
Five years of maintenance required in the tender, but only one year in the price formula — not contradictory if the end user signs the maintenance contracts
The Council of State rejects Presta Services' challenge and rules that the contracting authority could include only one year of maintenance in the price formula, even though the tender required bidders to offer at least five years — because the maintenance contracts are signed by sports clubs (the end users), not by the authority itself.
A 'this RFP is not a public contract' clause doesn't make you a private player — BPOST remains an administrative authority
The Council of State holds it has jurisdiction over BPOST's award of a water-fountain contract (estimated €150,000 over 5 years) to John Martin despite the express RFP clause that 'public procurement legislation does not apply' — but dismisses Aquacare's appeal for lack of interest in its grounds.
What you didn't impose 'on pain of substantial non-conformity' you can't later treat as essential
The Council of State suspends SPGE's decision to retroactively declare Carmeuse's bid irregular for deviating from a technical specification that the specifications had NOT marked 'on pain of substantial non-conformity' — and which cannot be promoted to essential after the fact.
A clarification sheet the contracting authority asked for itself — then ignored: without explanation, the award cannot stand
The Council of State suspends in extreme urgency the award of the design team for the Grand Théâtre in Verviers because the city set aside a clarifying table it had itself requested from a candidate team, without explaining why, and additionally failed to motivate the rejection on scenography.
A 'bankruptcy' from Digiflow dating from when you were 7 years old: blind trust in a database costs Verviers the award
The Council of State suspends in extreme urgency the exclusion of an architects' team from the Verviers contract because the city declared an architect 'bankrupt' on the basis of a Digiflow record that actually referred to an automotive activity closed in 2003 — and to a start date (1965) when the man was 7 years old.
Awarding points with 'value added' and 'value lost' without saying how many — does not hold up
The Council of State suspended the award to Sefac for tram lifting columns at De Lijn because the evaluation report assigns points using labels like 'value added', 'significant value lost' and 'very large value added' without ever explaining how many points each is worth.
Cancelling a procedure because the specifications are unclear is allowed — even if you weren't confused
The Council of State confirms: a contracting authority may decide not to award a lot and to relaunch with improved specifications, and a bidder saying 'but I understood it' is not enough to overturn that decision.
'Cheap Indian subcontractor' isn't a price justification — especially when the buyer checks your sample and finds it full of errors
CICADE bid less than a quarter of the estimate and about a third of winner Pixelius's price for digitising Wallonia's landscape features, and justified it with one sentence about an Indian subcontractor at "just a few dollars per hour" — the Council of State upholds the exclusion for abnormally low price because the justification wasn't quantified, gave no hourly rate, and didn't include correction time after quality control.
When your consultant becomes your supplier: that doesn't break the award — but only if your procurement design has already flattened the advantage
The Belgian National Office for Annual Leave first had A.O.S. (later Colliers) draw a dynamic-office concept for its new Rigoletto building, then awarded the furniture contract to that same Colliers, and the Council of State refuses to suspend: a prior-involvement situation under article 64 of the Royal Decree on Placement 2011 doesn't automatically force the buyer to formally verify the competitive advantage, provided the procurement architecture itself neutralizes that advantage.
'Best on two criteria beats best on one' is not a motivation — it's an arithmetic error
The Council of State suspends Infrabel's award to Schenck Process for 15 train weighing systems because the contracting authority simply added up two of three criteria against one, without weighing the actual gap between bids per criterion — while Lloyd's Register was €1.65 million cheaper.
A lowest price is not 'abnormally low' when it sits 45% above the authority's own estimate
Although the winning bid on a single sub-item was seven times lower than the applicant's, the Council of State refused to suspend the award — because the price still sat 45% above the contracting authority's estimate, and thus did not trigger the statutory duty to seek price justification.
Declaring a bid 'substantially irregular' requires more than a copy-paste sentence
The Council of State suspended the award because IFAPME declared Froireca's bid irregular using a generic phrase about 'comparability' and 'competition', without concretely explaining why the deviation was material — and what was added later in pleadings does not count.
Punishing a water thief is fine — but not as a ground to withdraw an earlier award decision
The Council of State suspended both the award to SACE and the withdrawal of the earlier award to Marcel Theis, because the Commune de Gouvy tried to undo the original award based on a water theft only discovered afterwards — breaching the retrait doctrine.
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This page shows all rulings of the Council of State (Belgium's supreme administrative court) on duty to state reasons in public procurement. Each ruling is summarized by TenderWolf in plain language, with a legal lesson and a practical question to ask yourself. View all rulings →