The General Court's Judgment of 21 February 2013 in case T-9/10 Evropaïki Dynamiki v Commission (Microsoft SharePoint) is a new addition to this seemingly never-ending saga of cases where the Greek IT company challenges procurement award decision on the two-fold basis of failure to state reasons and presence of manifest errors of assessment.
This Judgment basically reiterates the position of the EU Courts on the duty to state reasons but, interestingly, includes an obiter paragraph that is not always expressly mentioned in the growing case law in this area of EU public procurement.
In my opinion, paragraph 26 of this latest Evropaïki Dynamiki Judgment deserves emphasis, as the GC indicates that
It should also be borne in mind that the requirements to be satisfied by the statement of reasons depend on the circumstances of each case, in particular the content of the measure in question, the nature of the reasons given and the interest which the addressees of the measure, or other parties to whom it is of direct and individual concern, may have in obtaining explanations (see Case C‑367/95 P Commission v Sytraval and Brink’s France [1998] ECR I‑1719, paragraph 63 and case-law cited, and Case T‑465/04 Evropaïki Dynamiki v Commission, paragraph 49) (emphasis added).
This offers the basis for a far more restricted disclosure of information to unsuccessful candidates and disappointed bidders than usually provided by contracting authorities, and could (should) be used as the basis to rationalise this area of the law--where contracting authorities are indeed under significant pressure to provide excessive information during debriefing and bid protest procedures.
In fact, in the case at hand,
the Commission considers that it provided a statement of reasons exceeding that laid down in Article 100(2) of [the Financial Regulation] by informing the applicant of the reasons why its tender had been rejected as well as providing the scores obtained by the tenderers at the award stage, even though the applicant had not passed the selection phase (T-9/10 at para. 24, emphasis added).
Situations such as this should be avoided, given the negative impacts that excessive transparency can generate in terms of potential collusion and access to confidential information and business secrets of competitors. Therefore, once again, it seems desirable to clarify and rationalise this area of EU public procurement law in the current process of revision of the EU Directives on public procurement.