Legal Updates

A tender in which its evaluation criteria were first set when the bids were already revealed is an invalid tender

September 13, 2020
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A local council published a tender for the operation of community care and rehabilitation frameworks for people with disabilities and only after opening the envelopes of the bidders was it decided for the first time to set new evaluation criteria for determining the score of each bid while deviating from the original terms of the tender.
The Court accepted the petition and held that the tender is invalid and must be cancelled. The principle of equality is the essence of the tender principals and should be applied also to potential participants. Here, the subcommittee of the Tenders Committee chose to change the scoring and evaluation method by setting 18 new criteria for the first time after opening the tender box, and in a vague drafting. This situation allows the new criteria to be adjusted to a specific bidder whom the local council wants to see as the winner and may also allow the bidder to adjust its bid in retrospect to fit the criteria on which it is to be examined. Either way, this misconduct fatally violates the principle of equality and disqualification of the tender is required.