Irregular tender
A tender can be substantially or non-substantially irregular. Substantial irregularities lead to exclusion — the contracting authority has no discretion in this regard. Non-substantial irregularities may potentially be regularised.
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.
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.
Highest bidder challenges only the irregularity finding on his own bid — and loses on standing
The Council of State dismisses the urgent suspension request of a highest bidder whose offer was found materially irregular, because he challenges only that irregularity finding and says nothing about the award to his competitor — which, in a price-only procedure, means he cannot win the contract in any event.
'Our subcontractor has nearly 60 years of experience' does not justify a paint output of 135 m²/day
The Council of State rejects COMABAT's suspension request because the social housing company Sambre et Biesme rightly found the offered paint prices abnormally low: the subcontractor's claimed output of 135 m²/day was more than double what both an internal technical manager and an independent architect considered realistic.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 het bestek een ISO-norm voorschrijft als meetmethode en alle metingen consequent boven de maximaal toegelaten grens uitkomen, is de onregelmatigverklaring van de offerte niet onwettig — ook al komen eigen metingen van de inschrijver tot een ander resultaat
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de onregelmatigverklaring van een offerte voor interventiebroeken, omdat het bestek uitdrukkelijk ISO 3801 als meetmethode voorschreef, alle laboratoriummetingen consequent een gewicht boven de maximaal toegelaten grens van 255 g/m² opleverden, en de inschrijver niet aannemelijk maakt dat het verschil tussen de eerste en tweede meting of haar eigen afwijkende metingen de wettigheid van de vaststelling aantasten.
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.
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.
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.
Een vernietiging op vordering van een andere inschrijver doet het beroep tot nietigverklaring zijn voorwerp verliezen, maar niet de vordering tot schadevergoeding tot herstel — waarvoor de middelen alsnog moeten worden onderzocht
De Raad van State stelt vast dat het beroep tot nietigverklaring van de gunning van een opdracht voor gerechtsdeurwaarderdiensten voor de stad Fontaine-l'Évêque zijn voorwerp heeft verloren doordat dezelfde beslissing reeds is vernietigd in een parallel beroep van een andere inschrijver (arrest nr. 262.783), maar heropent de debatten en verwijst de zaak naar de gewone procedure om de middelen alsnog te onderzoeken in het licht van de vordering tot schadevergoeding tot herstel die de verzoekers nadien hebben ingesteld.
De intrekking van de bestreden gunningsbeslissing na een schorsingsvordering maakt die vordering onontvankelijk — maar de kosten vallen ten laste van de aanbestedende overheid
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing van de gunning van werken aan de maison rurale de Godinne als onontvankelijk, omdat de gemeente Yvoir de bestreden gunningsbeslissing heeft ingetrokken met terugwerkende kracht — waardoor de verzoeker niet langer benadeeld is — en legt de proceskosten ten laste van de gemeente.
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.
Gunningscriteria die kortere uitvoeringstermijnen belonen, zijn geen vrijbrief om minimale veiligheidseisen in het bestek naast je neer te leggen
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering van de tweede geweerde inschrijver tegen dezelfde gunning voor asbestverwijdering in tunnel 't Zand, en bevestigt dat de eis om het rijden naast een hermetische zone zoveel mogelijk te beperken een minimale bestekeis is — ook al creëren de gunningscriteria voor uitvoeringstermijn en beperking van tunnelsluiting een stimulans om het verkeer zo lang mogelijk open te houden.
Een bestekeis die 'zoveel mogelijk' iets vereist, kan toch een minimale eis zijn als dat uit het geheel van de bestekbepalingen en het voorwerp van de opdracht volgt
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tot schorsing bij uiterst dringende noodzakelijkheid van de gunning van een opdracht voor asbestverwijdering in een verkeerstunnel, omdat de eis om het rijden naast een hermetische zone 'zoveel mogelijk te beperken' — hoewel niet uitdrukkelijk als minimale eis aangeduid — uit het geheel van de bestekbepalingen en de twee voorgestelde faseringen wel degelijk als minimale vereiste kon worden afgeleid, en de offerte van de verzoeker daar fundamenteel van afweek door verkeer over de volledige lengte van de tunnel naast de hermetische zone te laten rijden.
Een nulprijs voor een post die een afzonderlijk subgunningscriterium vormt, is substantieel onregelmatig wanneer de kosten in werkelijkheid naar een andere post zijn verschoven
De Raad van State vernietigt de gunning van een opdracht voor videobelsoftware voor de 112-noodcentrale en brandweerdispatching, omdat de gekozen inschrijver een nulprijs opgaf voor de post implementatie — een afzonderlijk subgunningscriterium — terwijl uit zijn eigen offerte bleek dat hij daar wel degelijk prestaties voor moest leveren, waardoor de kosten ten onrechte naar het andere subgunningscriterium waren verschoven en de vergelijkbaarheid van de offertes was verhinderd.
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.
Blanco UEA van draagkrachtentiteit is substantieel onregelmatig als een technisch probleem niet aannemelijk wordt gemaakt
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering tegen de onregelmatigverklaring van een offerte voor een raamovereenkomst pechverhelping, omdat de inschrijver niet aannemelijk maakte dat een technisch probleem van het e-Procurement-platform de oorzaak was van het blanco UEA voor haar draagkrachtentiteit — de helpdesk bevestigde dat het naderhand overgemaakte document niet hetzelfde was als wat op het platform was opgeladen, de hash codes garandeerden dat documenten ongewijzigd aankomen, en de vier andere UEA's in hetzelfde gecompileerde bestand waren wel correct.
Ontbrekend attest van plaatsbezoek is niet automatisch een substantiële onregelmatigheid als het plaatsbezoek zelf vaststaat
De Raad van State schorst de onregelmatigverklaring van een offerte voor het ontwerp van een nieuwbouw omdat de aanbestedende overheid het ontbreken van een attest van plaatsbezoek als substantiële onregelmatigheid kwalificeerde, terwijl het plaatsbezoek zelf onbetwist had plaatsgevonden in aanwezigheid van de algemeen directeur van de aanbesteder, het bestek aan het bijvoegen van het attest geen substantieel karakter had verleend, het attest niet op straffe van wering was voorgeschreven, en de aanbesteder het attest zelf had uitgereikt — waardoor de onregelmatigverklaring neerkwam op overdreven formalisme.
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.
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.
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.
Perceelverdeling tussen zusterondernemingen om de concurrentie te omzeilen is een verboden entente — ook zonder intentie
De Raad van State verwerpt de vordering van het zusterbedrijf dat op perceel 1 had ingeschreven, en bevestigt dat de gecoördineerde perceelverdeling en offertecoördinatie tussen twee dochterondernemingen van dezelfde groep een verboden entente vormt, ongeacht of de ondernemingen de intentie hadden om de concurrentie te vervalsen.
Als je teststaal de test niet doorstaat, is je offerte onregelmatig — en ISO-certificaten redden je niet
De Raad van State verwerpt een schorsingsberoep tegen de wering van een offerte voor politiefietsen, omdat veiligheidsrisico's die tijdens een testperiode werden vastgesteld — een verbogen voorvork en voetcontact met het voorwiel — volstonden om de offerte als substantieel onregelmatig te beschouwen.
Verbonden ondernemingen weren zonder ze te horen? Dat kan niet
De Raad van State schorst de wering van offertes van twee zusterondernemingen wegens vermeende mededingingsverstoring, omdat de aanbestedende overheid hen niet eerst de kans heeft gegeven om aan te tonen dat hun offertes onafhankelijk tot stand zijn gekomen.
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.
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 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.
Als de regularisatie de kern is, mag je de stukken erover niet geheimhouden
De Raad van State heft de vertrouwelijkheid op van documenten over de regularisatie van een ontbrekende elektronische handtekening, omdat de verliezende inschrijver zonder inzage in die stukken niet zinvol kan controleren of de regularisatie correct is verlopen.
Authority withdraws the decision before the hearing? Your extreme-urgency challenge is not 'devoid of object' — it is inadmissible.
The Council of State dismisses an excluded bidder's extreme-urgency challenge as inadmissible because the authority had withdrawn the contested award before the hearing — the retroactive effect of the withdrawal means the applicant is no longer legally 'prejudiced' and therefore fails the admissibility condition of Article 14 of the legal-protection act.
If your e-procurement platform shows a different deadline from your email, you cannot brand bids as late
The Council of State suspends the award: Nautisport had announced by email that bids had to arrive by 2 July 2024, but the e-procurement platform itself — where bids had to be submitted — showed 18 July 2024; when Arcadus-Arcadis submitted on 18 July, their bid was rejected as late without any analysis of whose legitimate expectation had been created.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you contest the irregularity finding instead of fixing it, you can't later claim unequal treatment
The Council of State rejects Sportinfrabouw's appeal: it had the same opportunity to regularise as Lesuco but chose to contest the finding of irregularity instead of adjusting its offer — and therefore cannot invoke discrimination.
"Correcting" a price into a different unit than the specification prescribes is not a calculation error — it is rewriting the specification
The Council of State suspends the award to HR Groep Streetcare because the City of Antwerp recalculated the prices for the "truss frames for traffic signs" items into a price per square metre, while the specification and Standard Specification 250 expressly required a price per metre — a different unit than the one the competitor Trafiroad had used.
Submitting new plans after your bid is not 'correcting a material error' — it's modifying your offer
The Council of State rejects the emergency appeal of a design team that, after submitting its design-build offer, sent revised plans and a €40,000 price reduction to 'correct' elevation errors: such structural adjustments are a modification of the offer, not a correction of a material error within the meaning of article 34.
Indexing your own references to clear the threshold: the Council of State doesn't fall for it
The Council of State rejects Dherte's emergency claim against the award of a €23 million school construction contract to Artes because Dherte did two things it shouldn't: applying its own price-revision formula to inflate old references above the tender thresholds, and challenging only the €20 million threshold while its non-selection also independently rested on an unchallenged €10 million reference requirement for a school building.
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.
Admitting a 'misjudgment' in an email costs WattElse a wind farm project — even though this is not a public procurement
The Council of State rejects WattElse's appeal because its offer failed to respect the bestek's mandatory 1000-metre buffer to existing dwellings, and because the bidder itself admitted to a 'misjudgment' in a 20 May 2020 email — losing all standing to challenge the award to Eneco-Engie.
Demolition of 192 apartments: rejection – planning exceeding 'mandatory' 180-calendar-day deadline constitutes a substantive irregularity even without express 'on pain of nullity' clause
The Council of State rejects the suspension request against Toit & Moi's decision to disqualify Jean Nonet's tender for the demolition of 192 apartments in Jemappes (Mons) as substantively irregular, because the forecast planning (4 September 2023 to 4 April 2024) clearly exceeded the mandatory maximum deadline of 180 calendar days, without this requirement needing to be expressly labelled 'substantive' or 'on pain of nullity' to constitute a minimum requirement under article 76(1)(3) of the Royal Decree of 18 April 2017.
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.
A 'shelf life in months' isn't arithmetic — production and delivery may share the same calendar month
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award of 5 million surgical face masks to YNK Group, because the winning bidder credibly explained that its 60-month shelf life from delivery holds when production and delivery fall within the same month — even though Protect and Care chose to deduct production and transport time from its own offer.
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.
Use the workaround without protest, lose the right to attack it later
The Council of State refuses to suspend an award where both BAFOs were submitted by email after the e-tendering platform failed, because the complainant itself used that very same workaround without any objection and therefore has no standing to invoke the irregularity against the winner.
'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.
One precautionary clause too many in your bid = a zero on the entire criterion
A bidder who notes that its 42-calendar-day delivery time 'may be extended by annual public holidays and factory shutdowns' does not get its bid declared irregular — but is awarded 0 out of 5 on the entire 'Delivery Time' criterion, which cost it the contract.
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.
A statutory delegation clause won't save you if you don't include the delegation decision itself with your bid
The Council of State rejects contractor De Cock's appeal because he had the board resolution granting his managing director signing power published in the Belgian Official Gazette but failed to include it with his bid for the City of Charleroi — and the contracting authority is under no obligation to search the Gazette on its own.
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.
A retracted award does not reset your UDN clock: you have 15 days for the replacement decision — not one more
The Council of State declares ARAMIS's extension of its extreme-urgency action to the replacement award decision of 21 October 2023 inadmissible due to lateness (filed on day 18 whereas article 23 of the 17 June 2013 act allows only 15 days), and shelves the case sine die regarding the retracted original decision of 13 October 2023.
If your own cover letter states you cannot meet the specifications, a mere promise to 'comply' won't fix the irregularity
The Council of State dismisses Veolia's emergency suspension request against Ghent University, the incumbent contractor's bid for the HVAC maintenance framework being declared substantially irregular because Veolia's cover letter expressly stated that some specifications were 'not feasible' and proposed an alternative working method — defects going to the very essence of the bid that could not be cured by a mere statement of intent to comply.
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.
Withdrawing your decision after a suspension still leaves you with the full bill
The Flemish Region withdraws its award decision itself after a UDN suspension, but is nonetheless fully ordered to pay Profacts' procedural costs — and Ipsos pays 150 euros for its intervention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
€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.
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.
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.
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.
Authority withdraws award after extreme-urgency suspension — yet still loses and pays €1,216 in costs to the challenging bidder
Infrabel had on 23 August 2022 awarded a contract to TOTAL ENERGIES and declared Modalizy's bid irregular; the Council suspended under extreme urgency on 7 October (judgment 254.700), Infrabel withdrew the contested decision on 18 October and the case became moot — but the Council still ordered Infrabel to pay full procedural costs (€770 + filing fees + contribution) because a withdrawal is 'a form of substitute for an annulment in litigation'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Your bid is for 4 million — but it must be signed for the framework agreement's estimated 12 million
Equans lost a 12-million-euro lot because its Division Manager and Department Manager could only sign offers up to 10 million; the Council of State rules that the relevant value is the estimated value of the entire framework agreement, not the value of the test case the bid is based on.
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.
Your offer was irregular, you lost the contract — and you still get €10,261 in damages
The Council of State orders the municipality of Heers to pay €10,261.43 in damages to Idemasport despite the fact that its own offer was irregular, because the winning offer also turned out to be irregular and in a new award procedure Idemasport would have had a real chance — assessed in fairness at 50%.
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.
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'.
A '<' sign before your deadline turns your times into a range — and costs you a major SEPP contract
Cohezio, an established occupational health and prevention service provider, loses its SEPPT contract with the Province of Liège because it used formulae like '< 24h' instead of fixed intervention times — which the province read as a prohibited time range, and which the Council of State found not manifestly unreasonable enough to suspend.
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.
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.
Extracting a 500 mm centre-to-centre distance from a BIM model while the specifications show a figure with 122 mm: that bet Franki lost
The Council of State rejects Franki Construct's extreme-urgency action against the award of the cycle bridge at the N75 in Dilsen-Stokkem to Stadsbader: deriving a centre-to-centre spacing of 500 mm from an enlarged detail of the layout plan, while the specific specifications twice show a figure with 122 mm and safety requirements rule out a large opening, does not create a contradiction between the plan and the specifications that could be resolved via the precedence rule.
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.
STIB awards a GDPR tool to Infhotep, is suspended, withdraws — and awards the same GDPR tool to Infhotep again
The Council of State holds One Trust Technology's annulment action against STIB's award of a GDPR compliance tool to Infhotep moot because STIB withdrew the award after a successful suspension but then awarded the contract back to Infhotep — while still granting the challenger a €700 procedural indemnity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 'reservation' about air freight and customs in your masks bid wasn't a useful clarification — it was a deviation from the delivery schedule that cost you the award
The Council of State rejects I'll Be Bag's challenge against the Covid mask procurement of 50 million Community masks (awarded to Avrox and Tweeds & Cottons): tendering with 'reservations' about transport and customs on a strict delivery schedule is legally a deviation — and challenging that deviation only later, in a supplementary note, comes too late and forfeits the right to attack the remaining grounds.
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 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.
'Site preparation costs spread across unit prices'? Not when the specifications say 'TP' — VMG-De Cock pays €53,376 and slips to fourth place
VMG-De Cock left item 02.00 'site preparation — general' blank, arguing the cost was already spread over all unit prices, but the specifications expressly said 'TP' (total price); the gap formula pushed the bidder from third to fourth and the Council of State refused to suspend.
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.
What the contracting authority calls a 'wish' and what is a binding requirement — in 'Espace Rogier' that distinction costs the City of Namur a full suspension
The Council of State suspends the award of a 14 million euro combined contract to Cœur de Ville because the general programme — repeatedly and unambiguously — imposed an R+3 height for the private housing blocks, while the winning bid proposed R+5: a binding specification, not a 'wish', and the overshoot affects the price award criterion.
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.
Confirming is not the same as recalculating: how Bidfood lost its food deal with the best of intentions
The Council of State dismisses Bidfood Flanders's appeal against the City of Ghent: a clarification request from the contracting authority ('can you confirm your prices are per kg?') does not give the bidder the right to submit a new Excel with revised unit prices for 23 line items.
Admitted to negotiations ≠ your bid is compliant
The Council of State dismisses the suspension request of a vendor whose bid for a hospital laboratory information system was declared substantially irregular at the final stage — even though it had earlier been admitted to negotiations without objection.
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.
An 'additional tool' whose cost you leave out of your price gets no second chance
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award of the SPW hosting contract to NRB: ATOS had listed OpenShift in its bid as an 'additional tool' but did not include its licensing cost in the price — that is a substantial irregularity, not an ambiguity in the specification.
Winning the suspension does not protect your award — De Vlaamse Waterweg withdraws anyway, and pays the costs
De Vlaamse Waterweg won the interim proceedings against Envisan/Jan De Nul over dredging works on the Beneden-Durme, but withdrew the award decision itself seventeen days later — making the annulment moot and shifting the costs onto the contracting authority.
'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.
A photo of a bicycle is not a 'description of the equipment' — and with five defects in your bid you don't get a second chance
The City of Ghent excludes SGI Security from a EUR 3 million parking-control contract because of five cumulative defects in its bid (deviating walking routes, no planning tool, only a photo of a bike, only a photo of a uniform and contradictory hourly rates) — the Council of State confirms: a contracting authority is not obliged to plug every gap in a bid with a clarification request.
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.
Contracting authority withdraws its decision before the extreme-urgency hearing: application 'rejected' but you still recover 920 euros
OVAM withdraws the contested award decision eight days before the hearing after Terra Engineering & Consultancy files an extreme-urgency application; the Council of State rejects the application as moot but orders OVAM to pay roll fee, contribution and 700 euros procedural indemnity.
If your specifications ask for 'recent certificates from the manufacturer', you cannot later accept a supplier's own technical sheet
OTW required 'recent certifications' from the constructor for ZF gearbox oil, but awarded to WOLF OIL which only attached its own technical data sheet — the Council of State suspends with immediate execution: a contracting authority cannot loosen its own specifications after the fact.
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.
'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.
An EUR 2,681 omission made the difference between winning and losing — and the Council of State sided with the bidder who reported it
The Council of State dismisses Bekaert's appeal against the award to Wyckaert for the construction of a police building, and confirms that the duty to report under article 81 of the Royal Decree of 18 April 2017 applies only to insurmountable defects in the contract documents — not to small omissions in the bill of quantities that a diligent bidder spots only when pricing.
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.
A ESPD with only the odd pages scanned: a scanning slip, not grounds for exclusion
The Council of State suspends the award to Roularta because the City of Antwerp excluded Roto Smeets' bid for an incomplete ESPD (only odd pages scanned), although the scanning error resembles 'an inadvertent slip' and the equality of bidders was not at stake.
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.
An unauthorised quantity change can't be 'corrected' — the bid must be excluded
The Council of State suspends the BIM's award to BDO because BDO had unilaterally reduced the estimated quantity in the inventory without the specifications authorising it — the contracting authority should have excluded the bid as substantially irregular instead of 'restoring' the original quantity under article 86.
Adding a correction note to your bid isn't post-opening regularisation — it's how the system is meant to work
The Council of State rejects VIABUILD's appeal: KRINKELS had attached an explanatory note 'Errors and/or omissions' to its bid from the moment of submission to correct certain items — a procedure expressly provided for in article 83, §2 of the 2011 Royal Decree, not a prohibited post-opening modification.
A site visit for 'contract A' can't double as a site visit for 'contract B' — even if it's the same site
The Council of State suspends the award to Move & Play – MP Solutions of the redevelopment of the Scheutbos playground: the specifications required a site visit 'on pain of nullity', and the certificate the winner attached from an earlier visit for the parallel supplies contract does not satisfy that requirement for the works contract.
Claiming in a pre-litigation letter that the winner used 'wrong measurements' can backfire — unless you put it in your application
The Council reopens the debate in VMG-De Cock's challenge to the award to Himpe (€2,671,181 for the new local services centre De Mantel in Zwijnaarde) and rejects OCMW Ghent's argument that VMG's own bid would be irregular because she based her price on a different undermining width than the bill of quantities — a legal appreciation in a 26 October 2016 letter does not bind the Council.
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.
Three documents may be requested after opening — provided they add nothing to what the bid already substantively committed to
The Council rejects the extreme-urgency appeal of THV IJzerpoort against the award of the Nieuwpoort storm-surge barrier (€50,108,070.70 incl. VAT, awarded to Herbosch-Kiere – Jan De Nul) over the post-opening request to other bidders for three documents (10-year LED-module warranty certificate, lift maintenance contract proposals, fire-detection certification): article 96, § 4 of the 2011 Award Royal Decree allows this where the documents bring no change to the bid or merely provide 'additional assurance' for commitments the bidder had already entered into by signing.
The contracting authority withdraws five days before the hearing — and itself acknowledges that 'the arguments in the appeal cannot be contested'
The Council stays the proceedings and adjourns sine die after CAHC withdraws — two days before the extreme-urgency hearing — its award of the architect contract for a Stoumont/Trois-Ponts retirement home, citing 'arguments in the appeal that cannot be contested' — a textbook example of how an extreme-urgency appeal makes a contracting authority fold without any merits ruling.
An item on the Synergrid list is a combination, not a single component — swap the driver and you're no longer on the list
The Council rejects Schreder's extreme-urgency application against Eandis' decision to declare all seven bids for LED street lighting (lots 1, 2 and 3) substantially irregular because the offered combination of luminaire, LED module and driver does not appear as such on the Synergrid 005 list — even though the separate driver is itself 005-certified.
Leaving an unsigned offer on e-procurement isn't a double submission — it's an abandoned half-finished project
Aswebo had uploaded documents to e-Tendering without ever signing the submission report, then joined THV Stadsbader-Aswebo for a 7-million-euro road works tender — Roads and Traffic excluded both offers as 'double bids', but the Council of State suspended that decision: art. 54 §2 requires a purpose-related test, not textual punishment.
A price justification based on 3 hours of work — when the specifications require two buses — isn't analysis, it's negligence
The City of Ninove awarded a school transport contract priced at €107,611 (GEO) to a competitor at €41,190 — almost 2.5 times cheaper — after a 'price justification' based on three hours of service, even though the specifications required two separate buses on separate routes.
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.
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.
An increased lawyers' costs award (€2,800) is not granted by claiming the authority 'knew it was wrong' — you must adduce concrete circumstances
The Council of State lifts the suspension of an award by the Province of Flemish Brabant to BVBA Geerts for waterway maintenance works, and grants only the basic €700 in lawyers' costs — not the requested €2,800 — because Audenaert adduced no concrete circumstances justifying the fourfold uplift.
Attaching outdated articles of association to your bid is having your own bid declared void — and the contracting authority is not required to protect you against it
The Council of State rejects Blue-Mobility's extreme-urgency action against the City of Ghent's award of the bike-sharing contract to vzw Bycykel, because Blue-Mobility's bid turned out to be signed by a proxy whose authority came from a director who, under the amended — but not attached — articles of association, had no power to represent the company.
Crossed out the binding clause on the bid form? Then you submitted no bid, even if you signed everything else
The Council of State rejects Horeservi Catering's extreme-urgency action against the award of a four-year framework agreement for student catering to Prorest, because on the bid form the essential clause by which the bidder commits 'on its movable and immovable property' to performing the contract had been crossed out — no commitment, no bid, no interest.
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.
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.
Your offer was 915 euros cheaper than the winner — and you still lose your suspension over one missing line above the signature
Dranken Pede comes within 916 euros of Inbev Belgium's winning offer for a three-year water contract at Aalst's public welfare centre, but loses its suspension without any review on the merits: the offer was signed by 'Mark Pede in his capacity as director', whereas only the company bvba Pede was statutorily authorised to bind the bidder — a substantial and unfixable defect that voids the offer and removes any standing.
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.
Asking for a €48,275 price supplement after the bid validity period? You may lose your awarded contract to a competitor
Devagro had won the demolition of the Veurne sugar factory for €574,887.92, but its registered request for a €48,275 price supplement prompted the contracting authority WVI to let all bidders revise their prices — and Aertssen took the contract at €610,625.42 while Devagro fell to second; the Council of State dismisses the challenge to that new award.
Justifying a price by saying 'this is what my subcontractor charges' is no justification — and miss the 30-day clock after a rejected suspension, and you lose your annulment too
Wanty's bid for the rehabilitation of the Oignies mine site was declared irregular because three items had been justified by simply pointing to the subcontractor's price — a justification that does not satisfy art. 21 of the RD of 15 July 2011 — and after the extreme-urgency suspension was already rejected, Wanty filed no request to continue the annulment within 30 days, so the Council of State records the abandonment of the action.
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.
A reference number ending in '040' costs a contractor a €2.1 million contract
The Council of State refuses to suspend the award of the Pivert 2 renovation of 65 social housing units in Anderlues to Lixon, because the insulation panel that Hullbridge offered under the reference 'RHINOPOR PS 15 SE 040 120 mm' prima facie has a lambda coefficient of 0.040 W/m²K — whereas the specifications require 0.032 — and the bidder should have verified this when asked to justify its prices.
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.
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.
Including a formal requirement in the specifications is not the same as making it essential
The fact that a contracting authority explicitly includes a formal requirement (Excel file, file naming convention) in its specifications does not automatically make a deviation a substantial irregularity — the authority retains discretion and may judge that comparability is not affected.
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.
'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.
Lowest price with a submersible pump that doesn't meet the specifications: technical non-compliance costs you the standing to litigate
The Council of State dismisses the extreme-urgency challenge by the joint venture WeGroSan/Antea against the awarding to Sportinfrabouw, because the joint venture — the lowest bidder at 1.39 million euros — submitted three items technically non-compliant with the specifications (submersible pump, irrigation control cabinet, sports underlay) and failed to contest this finding in its petition, depriving it of standing to challenge the award.
Missing 100 ml is a detail, missing 700 ml is an irregular bid — proportionality cuts both ways
The Council of State rejects SCA Hygiene Products' challenge to the award of a public welfare centre's nursing products framework to Ontex and rules that a 700 ml absorption shortfall against a 3,800 ml specification is materially different from a 100 ml shortfall — no breach of equal treatment.
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.
If your own bid says 'average 100 dB', the authority can use that against you
The Council of State dismissed Fire Technics' urgent application: the specifications required 'less than 100 dB(A)' as an essential requirement, and Fire Technics' own bid said 'average 100 dB(A)' and elsewhere '100.1 dB(A)' — so the authority could reject it based on Fire Technics' own documents, without first testing.
'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.
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.
Cover letters count: "valid for 1 month" alongside your bid = materially irregular, bid binned
Dolmans Landscaping wrote in the cover letter accompanying its bid for weed management across seven Limburg municipalities that "this offer is valid until 1 month after the offer date" — Infrax declared the bid materially irregular for deviating from the bid validity period of 90 days set out in the specifications, and the Council of State agreed: the cover letter could be read as part of the offer, even though it was not a completed tender form.
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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 →