0,00 € Offer: is this a price quotation?

(Tribunal Decision – Nordbayern
Az.: RMF-SG21-3194-5-11
of the 23.06.2020)

The Case:

The contracting authority issued a Europe-wide invitation to tender for the installation of a stainless steel pool in the course of a swimming pool renovation using the procurement open procedure. According to the submission protocol, the applicant’s bid was in first place. However, the awarding authority excluded the applicant’s bid from the evaluation because it did not contain prices.

The applicant objected to the exclusion of its bid and filed an application for review. In the present case, the registration of only six items out of a total of almost 120 items was disputed. The applicant had indicated an amount of “0.00 €” as the unit price for each of the six items in this regard and by doing this, no main item was affected.

It was decided on June 2021, that application for review is to consider admissible and well-founded. The awarding authority wrongly decided to exclude the applicant’s bid. According to case law of the higher courts, the indication of “0.00” € is a price indication. The price information was therefore not missing. If individual price entries are not comprehensible for a contracting authority, it may not exclude the tender without further ado. The bidder must be able to clarify the contradictions. Even a tender with an unreasonably low price may in principle only be excluded if the tenderer has previously been requested in text form to clarify how the prices were determined.

procurement law

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