The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) published a tender for transporting cargo in a freight vehicle, which included significant discrepancies between the tender documents and the technical specifications of the tender.
The Supreme Court held the tender is to be canceled and a new tender is to be published. As long as the deadline for submitting bids in the tender has not passed, the tender publisher may make any changes to it. After such date, the Tenders Committee is no longer entitled to change material terms and requirements set forth in the tender documents except in the case of minor changes, such as the correction of technical errors or clerical mistakes. In that specific tender, the bidders were required to declare that they owned vehicles of a certain type and in quantity that met all the technical requirements under the tender documents, but the wording of the declaration referred to vehicles of a type that did not match the type of vehicles defined in the technical specifications attached to the tender. In this situation, it is not a 'technical' change rather a material change that harms the principle of equality between the bidders and even constitutes a potential harm to third parties who might have bid in the tender had it been worded correctly in the first place. Therefore, the tender is to be canceled and a new tender be published in its place.