The tenders committee decided not to award the bidder in the tender a score of a tender criteria for which the score was significant for the purpose of winning the tender. The bidder in the tender contended that the decision of the tenders committee, de facto, prevented it from winning.
The Court rejected the petition and held that there was no defect that justified intervention in the discretion of the tenders committee. A tenders committee is entitled to set criteria that grant it broad discretion in selecting the winner of the tender. Scoring a bid is at the heart of the tenders committee professional discretion. Intervention in the tenders committee decisions in such matters will be done in very exceptional cases. Here, in the tender, the bidders were requested to present a business or organizational "conflict" that arose between the bidder and a service customer, in order to examine the bidder's mode of operation. The score given to this component was significant for the purpose of examining the quality of the bid, while a bidder who fails in this component and receives only a few points in it, certainly a bidder who does not receive even a single point in it, would have found it very difficult to fill this gap in comparison to the other criteria. However, as the tenders committee was not impressed by the manner in which the bidder presented this criterion in its bid, it was entitled not to grant the bidder a single point and this is not a defect that justifies the Court intervention.