Irregular tender
An irregular tender does not meet the formal or material requirements of the specifications. The distinction between substantial and non-substantial irregularities is crucial: substantial irregularities mandatorily lead to exclusion.
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.
Infrabel declares offer irregular, withdraws that decision as soon as the Council of State calls — and the bill stays open
Infrabel declared French company ENVU's offer irregular for a railway weed control contract, then withdrew that decision before the Council of State hearing — making the suspension claim moot, but with costs reserved pending the ongoing annulment proceedings.
Wrong account on e-Procurement? If the entire application makes clear who the candidate is, the authority cannot remain blind
The Council of State suspends the non-selection of a candidate who uploaded its participation request through the e-Procurement account of a sister company, because the entirety of the submitted documents and the provided clarification unambiguously showed who the actual candidate was.
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.
Your BAFO says the opposite of what you explained verbally? The BAFO prevails — and the contracting authority's silence during an earlier tender round is not approval
The Council of State rejects the suspension of the award of a framework agreement for the LON network at Antwerp Central Station, because a clause in the BAFO placing all costs except faulty maintenance on the contracting authority is incompatible with the required Full Omnium — even though the tenderer verbally stated the opposite.
After a suspension the contracting authority withdraws — applicant still pockets €770
The Council of State declares Safe & Sound's annulment appeal moot after La Sambrienne withdrew its decision declaring the firm's bid irregular, and orders the contracting authority to pay all costs including a €770 procedural indemnity.
Lose your urgent suspension and still pocket €770 — how does that work?
The Council of State declares the annulment appeal of auditor firm Callens, Vandelanotte & Theunissen against the irregularity ruling for the CAPAC auditor contract moot, and grants €770 in procedural indemnity — even though the applicant had lost its earlier urgent suspension.
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.
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.
Application devoid of purpose after withdrawal of exclusion of tender and award of framework agreement for access control installations City of Ghent — costs charged to respondent
The Council of State rejected the suspension application by NV SERIS TECHNOLOGY against the City of Ghent's decision to exclude its tender for the framework agreement for emergency repairs, maintenance and renovation of access control installations as irregular and to award the contract to a third party, as the City of Ghent had withdrawn the contested decision, rendering the application devoid of purpose, with costs charged to the City of Ghent.
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.
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.
Mentioning 'our trusted partner' in your method statement = implicitly relying on third-party capacity — UEA or no UEA
T&D Security loses the City of Ghent parking surveillance tender because their method statement names a licensed alarm centre (nv P.G.) as a partner without filing a UEA and capacity-commitment letter for that partner — result: substantial irregularity and mandatory annulment of the offer.
Wrongly declared irregular? Don't count on 10% — the Council calculates your 'lost chance', and here it landed at 90%
The Council of State awards BV Rezuni 22,695.30 euros in restitution damages (90% of 10% of its offer price) after an earlier annulled award, because the flat-rate 10% rule does not automatically apply and the chance of being awarded the contract is concretely estimated.
You can't 'edit out' a late offer component — if one piece arrives late, the entire offer is tainted
Intradel tried to rescue a previously-annulled award to Strabag by simply excluding the late-submitted performance note from the scoring, but the Council of State confirms that a late component poisons the whole offer — you can't reason away the contamination by ignoring the contaminated piece.
A Proof of Concept with a dual role — compliance check and technical scoring — needs two separate reading lenses
The Council of State dismisses Orange Belgium's challenge to Infrabel's €23.3 million CyberSOC framework award, because Orange's claim that Thales failed the POC rests on a confusion between the POC's compliance check (where everyone scored 'YES') and the technical evaluation (where Thales scored mid-range).
When the contracting authority offers a chance to regularise and you refuse — that equals 'I do not accept the contract terms'
The Council of State dismisses Verhoeve Marc's challenge to the rejection of his lowest bid for the redesign of the Waaitjesstraat in Lebbeke: he read item 5 of the bill of quantities (600 m² of cobblestone surfacing) as covering only the repair of the ~50 m² still in place, refused the formal offer to regularise, and stuck stubbornly to his own reading — a stance the Council equates with non-acceptance of the contract terms.
'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.
Your bid was declared irregular? Then you can no longer challenge the award to the competitor — unless you also challenge your own rejection
Écoterres had its bid for a Walloon framework agreement for soil processing rejected as substantially irregular; the Council of State dismisses its extreme-urgency action for lack of interest in the two pleas — an important reminder of the line between 'interest in the action' and 'interest in the plea'.
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.
'Correcting' a contradiction in your bid after you've seen the competitors' prices is not a material error — it breaks the equal-treatment principle
The Council of State suspends the re-award to ETS BERTRAND, because the city of Philippeville treated a contradiction in its bid (cover letter 'excl. VAT', form '€ incl. VAT' for the same figures) as a 'purely material error' — while the bidder only sent its 'clarification' after reading OCTA+'s prices in the first award decision.
One signature short — and no second chance, even when a competitor got one
BUUR lost a contract worth nearly EUR 200,000 because its tender was signed by only one delegated director where the company's articles required two — and the Council ruled the awarding authority was under no obligation to allow regularisation, even though it had granted regularisation to another bidder at an earlier stage.
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.
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.
An email from the contracting authority does not amend the specifications — bidding below the minimum capacity remains a substantial irregularity
The Council of State rejects Stago BNL's extreme-urgency appeal against the award of four haemostasis analyzers to Siemens, because Stago offered devices with 260 and 100 analyses per hour where the specifications required 300 and 150 — and because a clarifying email from the hospital to Stago alone, which did not address capacity, could not override the specifications.
Track public tenders?
Receive daily relevant tenders tailored to your business. Including AI summaries, competitive analysis and market intelligence.
This page shows all rulings of the Council of State (Belgium's supreme administrative court) on irregular tender 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 →