ECJ avoids providing guidance on intensity of judicial review of procurement decisions by sticking to strictly formalistic approach: The Gaping hole remains (C-171/15)

In its Judgment of 14 December 2016, Connexxion Taxi Services, C-171/15, EU:C:2016:948, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has provided clarification on whether contracting authorities can decide to subject their decisions to exclude economic operators from procurement procedures to a proportionality assessment even where such assessment would deviate from the strict rules created in the tender documentation by the contracting authorities themselves.

In the case at hand, a Dutch contracting authority had published tender documents that seemed to create an automatic obligation to exclude by stating that: 'A tender to which a ground for exclusion applies shall be set aside and shall not be eligible for further (substantive) assessment'. However, the contracting authority subsequently sought to rely on generally applicable Dutch administrative law (in particular, the Explanatory Memorandum of the law transposing the 2004 public procurement Directive) to subject the exclusion decision to a proportionality assessment. On the basis of that proportionality analysis, the contracting authority decided not to exclude the tenderer and to award it the contract.

This triggered the challenge by a competing tenderer, which claimed that, having found that the tenderer had been guilty of grave professional misconduct, the contracting authority was not in a position to make an assessment of proportionality. That assessment would have already been carried out by including the misconduct as an absolute ground for exclusion in the descriptive document. Given the wording of the latter, it was argued that it would be contrary to the principles of public access, transparency and equality in matters of administrative procurement for the contracting authority to have the power to assess the proportionality of the ground for exclusion.

The Dutch referring court asked the ECJ to consider whether Art 45(2) of Directive 2004/18/EC precluded a contracting authority from being obliged to assess under national law, and in accordance with the principle of proportionality, whether a tenderer which had been guilty of grave professional misconduct should be excluded from a contract. The referring court put particular stress on the fact that the ECJ had not adjudicated on the importance to be attached to the fact that, in the tender conditions, the contracting authority had provided for the rejection, without any examination of the substance, of any tender to which a ground of exclusion applies. In answering those questions, the ECJ decided to stick very closely to two of its lines of case law that, ultimately, create a very difficult (dis)functional situation.

First, following precedents in La Cascina and Others, C‑226/04 and C‑228/04, EU:C:2006:94, and in Consorzio Stabile Libor Lavori Pubblici, C‑358/12, EU:C:2014:2063, the ECJ reiterated that the discretionary exclusion grounds regulated in Art 45(2) Dir 2004/18 (and now in art 57(4) Dir 2014/24) do 'not provide for uniform application at EU level of the grounds of exclusion it mentions, since the Member States may choose not to apply those grounds of exclusion at all or to incorporate them into national law with varying degrees of rigour according to legal, economic or social considerations prevailing at national level. In that context, the Member States have the power to make the criteria laid down in Article 45(2) less onerous or more flexible' (C-171/15, para 29). This led the ECJ to establish that

31 As far as concerns the grounds for excluding a tenderer which has been guilty of grave professional misconduct from a contract, it is clear from the order for reference that [Dutch] legislation requires the contracting authority concerned, which establishes that the tenderer has been guilty of such misconduct, to determine, in accordance with the principle of proportionality, whether the tenderer should in fact be excluded.
32 Thus, it appears that that assessment of the proportionality of the exclusion makes the application of the ground of exclusion relating to grave professional misconduct laid down in Article 45(2)(d) of Directive 2004/18 more flexible ... Furthermore, it follows from recital 2 thereof that the principle of proportionality applies in a general manner to public procurement procedures (C-171/15, paras 31-32, emphasis added).

Ultimately, then, national legislation which requires a contracting authority to assess, in accordance with the principle of proportionality, whether it is in fact appropriate to exclude from a public contract a tenderer which has been guilty of grave professional misconduct is compatible with EU public procurement law (C-171/15, para 33).

Second, and in stark contrast with this seemingly functional and principles-oriented interpretation of the rules in Directive 2004/18/EC, the ECJ then moved on to adopt a very formalistic approach when considering the specific situation where the contracting authority would have excluded the possibility of such proportionality assessment in the tender documentation by establishing that exclusion on specific grounds would not be subjected to any substantive assessment. It may have been relevant at this point to know with more precision whether that would have been illegal under Dutch law for the tender documentation could be seen as contra legem (as, in my view, it would have been eg under Spanish law due to the public administration's duty to conduct its business with subjection to the applicable laws and regulations).

Be it as it may, the ECJ framed the issue in the following terms:

 36 It is conceivable that, when the contract documents are drafted, the contracting authority concerned may take the view, in accordance with the nature of that contract, the sensitive nature of the services which are its subject, and the requirements of professional honesty and reliability of the economic operators which arise from that, that the commission of grave professional misconduct must result in the automatic rejection of the tender and the exclusion of the tenderer at fault, provided that the principle of proportionality is observed when the seriousness of that misconduct is assessed.
37 Such a clause, inserted into the contract documents in unambiguous terms ... enables all economic operators which are reasonably well informed exercising ordinary care to be apprised of the requirements of the contracting authority and the conditions of the contract so they may act accordingly (C-171/15, paras 36-37, emphasis added).

I find these passages, and in particular para 36, very confusing. It seems to indicate that the contracting authority, despite the discretion it has in deciding to include as applicable the ground of discretionary exclusion due to grave professional misconduct in the tender documentation or not, remains bound to ensure that 'the principle of proportionality is observed when the seriousness of that misconduct is assessed'. That would, in and of itself, exclude the possibility of predetermining that the exclusion on that ground will be absolute and not subjected to any further (substantive) assessment. Therefore, making this be followed by para 37, where the contrary underlying position exists in the determination that setting a clause of automatic exclusion in unambiguous terms provides tenderers with a clear view of the requirements, is at least disconcerting.

The ECJ then decided to follow very formalistic precedents whereby 'the contracting authority must comply strictly with the criteria which it has itself laid down (see, to that effect, judgment of 10 October 2013, Manova, C‑336/12, EU:C:2013:647, paragraph 40 and the case-law cited) in the light, in particular, of Annex VII A, paragraph 17, to Directive 2004/18' (C-171/15, para 38). It also added that, following its more recent Judgment in Pizzo, C‑27/15, EU:C:2016:404, 'the principle of equal treatment requires tenderers to be afforded equality of opportunity when formulating their tenders, which therefore implies that the bids of all tenderers must be subject to the same conditions' and that 'the obligation of transparency requires that all the conditions and detailed rules of the award procedure must be drawn up in a clear, precise and unequivocal manner in the contract notice or specifications so that, first, all reasonably informed tenderers exercising ordinary care can understand their exact significance and interpret them in the same way and, second, the contracting authority is able to ascertain whether the tenders submitted satisfy the criteria applying to the contract in question' (for discussion, see here).

On the basis of this, the ECJ creates an argument whereby tenderers from different Member States will be less likely to submit tenders when they are affected by an exclusion ground because they may not be aware of the possibility of their exclusion actually being subjected to a proportionality assessment despite the explicit terms of the tender documents, which the ECJ considers domestic tenders would do. From that, the ECJ concludes that 'the assessment of the exclusion at issue in the light of the principle of proportionality, where the tender conditions of the contract concerned provide for the rejection of tenders which are covered by such an exclusion clause without any assessment of that principle, is liable to place the economic operators concerned in an uncertain position and adversely affect the principle of equal treatment and compliance with the obligation of transparency' (see C-171/15, paras 41-43). Ultimately, then, the ECJ considers that the decision to subject the decision whether to exclude the tenderer to a proportionality assessment despite the explicit terms of the tender documents was contrary to EU public procurement law.

Critical remarks

I find the Connexxion Taxi Services Judgment very confusing because it seems to answer two interconnected questions about the relevance and effectiveness of the general principles of public procurement in an intrinsically contradictory manner, and it seems to me that the ECJ has taken another step down the formalist road. In the case at hand, and following the proposals of Advocate General Campos Sánchez-Bordona (see here), I considered that it must be right that contracting authorities are always under a general obligation to act in a proportionate manner and, consequently, each decision they adopt needs to be proportionate under the circumstances and pro-competitive, and that ultimately 'a contracting authority must retain the power to assess, on a case-by-case basis, the gravity of the circumstances that would lead to exclusion of the tenderer. And ... it must also balance them against the effects that such exclusion would have on competition' [see A Sanchez-Graells, Public procurement and the EU competition rules, 2nd edn (Oxford, Hart, 2015) 293, references omitted].  

Despite the fact that the Connexxion Taxi Services Judgment sticks to the traditional formalist approach whereby the Court does not allow contracting authorities to deviate from the strictures of the published tender documentation, and this must at this stage not come as a surprise, the decision strikes as particularly odd because the ECJ does not seem to give much weight to the general principle of proportionality--either as enacted under the disputed Dutch rules, or more generally under the EU public procurement rules themselves--despite having accepted that the general principle can (and should?) control all procurement decisions. Remarkably, the ECJ deviated from the more progressive and flexible approach advanced by the AG and also created a strange focus of analysis by moving from the assessment of the decision of the contracting authority to the potential incentives of participation for non-domestic economic operators in a way that I also find very formalistic and potentially misguided.

Considering Connexxion Taxi ServicesManova and other precedents together, what seems clear is that contracting authorities can only reduce the scope of their discretion by self-imposed restrictions published in the tender documents. Thus, they would be better off by publishing bare bones tender documents and then exercising administrative discretion subject only to compliance with general principles of public procurement, as well as applicable domestic rules. However, this would fly on the face of Pizzo where the way the contracting authority justifies its decisions does not result immediately from the tender documents, which then gives contracting authorities the contrary incentive to reiterate all domestic rules in the tender documentation.

Other than contradictory, these sets of case law are also extremely formalistic and ultimately built on a non-functional obsession with the integration of the single market that can get on the way of the development of sound public procurement practice. Ultimately, the general principles of public procurement should be there to create sufficient checks and balances and, in their generality, they should rank higher than tender documents. Actually, it is not foreign to the ECJ case law to consider that tender requirements that are disproportionate or discriminatory cannot be included in the tender documentation (or need to be set aside, or ultimately determine the ineffectiveness of the procurement exercise). Thus, it would be desirable for that logical hierarchy to remain a constant, even if it means that cross-border participation in procurement processes does not come at zero transaction costs and that interested undertakings need to make themselves familiar with the domestic rules of the jurisdiction in which they are tendering.

Beyond that, it also seems to me that the ECJ is inadvertently creating an absolute need for an exclusion-related special procedural phase, where tenderers other than those affected by potential exclusion have a justiciable right to force the contracting authority to review the circumstances of other tenderers. This is not necessarily an overall undesirable development, but it can be problematic in many ways, not least because the EU substantive and procedural rules are not adapted to that function [see A Sanchez-Graells, “‘If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It'? EU Requirements of Administrative Oversight and Judicial Protection for Public Contracts”, in S Torricelli & F Folliot Lalliot (eds), Administrative oversight and judicial protection for public contracts (Larcier, 2017) forthcoming]. 

Last, but not least, it is also worth noting that, by answering in the way it has, the ECJ has avoided the need to provide clarification on the requirements of intensity of judicial review of public procurement decisions at Member State level, on which AG Campos Sánchez-Bordona had put together a rather stringent and not uncontroversial proposal (see here). Unfortunately, then, given the ECJ's unwillingness to answer that question, we will continue puzzledly looking at the gaping hole that Prof Caranta identified in the ECJ's jurisprudence concerning public procurement remedies [see R Caranta, 'Many Different Paths, but Are They All Leading to Effectiveness?', in S Treumer & F Lichère (eds), Enforcement of the EU Public Procurement Rules, vol 3 European Procurement Law Series (Copenhagen, DJØF Publishing, 2011) 53, 84].

 

AG delineates boundaries of administrative proportionality assessments and intensity of judicial review requirements under EU public procurement law (C-171/15)

In his Opinion of 30 June 2016 in Connexxion Taxi Services, C-171/15, EU:C:2016:506, Advocate General Campos Sánchez-Bordona has addressed two important issues concerning the judicial review of a decision not to exclude an economic operator that had potentially incurred in serious professional misconduct despite the tender documentation indicating that 'A tender to which a ground for exclusion applies shall be set aside and shall not be eligible for further (substantive) assessment'.

The preliminary reference sent to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) mainly raises two issues: firstly, whether it was possible for the contracting authority to apply a proportionality assessment before proceeding to exclude the economic operator--or, in the circumstances of the case, in order to decide not to exclude. And, secondly, whether EU law precluded national courts from solely engaging in ‘marginal’ review as to whether the contracting authority could reasonably have come to the decision not to exclude a tenderer notwithstanding the fact that that it was guilty of grave professional misconduct, rather than carrying out an ‘unrestricted’ judicial review of the assessment conducted on the basis of the principle of proportionality. Both are interesting issues. Both were to be decided under the 2004 EU public procurement rules, but both are clearly relevant under the revised 2014 package.

Again on the interaction between general (administrative) law and tender documentation

The first issue fundamentally stems from the fact that applicable Dutch law and its interpretative guidance foresee that 'the assessment of whether a tenderer must actually be excluded, having regard to the general principles of Directive 2004/18, must always be proportional and be carried out in a non-discriminatory manner' (Opinion in C-171/15, para 10). In the Connexxion Taxi Services case, the contracting authority engaged in such proportionality assessment despite having published tender documentation that seemed to create an automatic obligation to exclude by stating that: 'A tender to which a ground for exclusion applies shall be set aside and shall not be eligible for further (substantive) assessment'. As a result of the proportionality analysis, it decided not to exclude a tenderer competing with Connexxion , according to which 'the contracting authority [was] not in a position to make an assessment of proportionality having found that the tenderer [had] been guilty of grave professional misconduct. That assessment [had] already been carried out by inclusion of the misconduct as a ground for exclusion in the descriptive document. Given the wording of the latter, it would be contrary to the principles of public access, transparency and equality in matters of administrative procurement for the contracting authority to have the power to assess the proportionality of the ground for exclusion.' (para 30). 

Somehow, this raises a question that can be seen as the mirror image of the controversy underlying the recent Pizzo Judgment (C-27/15, EU:C:2016:404, see comments here). In Pizzo, the contracting authority sought to rely on generally applicable administrative law rules to exclude economic operators. The CJEU ruled against that possibility and created a middle-path whereby a contracting authority seeking to engage in that exclusion would need to provide the tenderer an opportunity to regularise its position and comply with that general obligation within a period of time set by the contracting authority. Conversely, in Connexxion Taxi Services, the CJEU is expected to rule on whether reliance on generally applicable administrative law rules can be used to deactivate specific exclusion choices established in the tender documentation. AG Campos submits that the Court should answer in the affirmative and that this is not contrary to Pizzo. I agree.

In his Opinion, AG Campos stresses that

51. The requirement included in paragraph 3.1 of the descriptive document (‘a tender to which a ground for exclusion applies must be set aside’), precisely because of its quasi-regulatory nature, must, in my view, be read in the light of the interpretative rules applicable to all subordinate legal rules, which cannot disregard the more general rules which govern them. If the [applicable rule] provides that exclusion on the ground of grave professional misconduct requires that the contracting authority examine each particular case ‘on the basis of the nature and size of the public contract, the type and scope of the misconduct and the measures taken in the meantime by the undertaking’, the fact that the descriptive document is silent as to that necessary and individual application of the principle of proportionality cannot result in that principle being disregarded.
52. That approach is confirmed from the perspective of EU law. The case-law of the Court on the optional grounds for exclusion, rejecting their automatic application, confirms the need for that consistent interpretation. It follows from the judgment in Forposta and ABC Direct Contact that automatic exclusion (of a tenderer guilty of grave misconduct) could go beyond the discretion conferred on Member States by Article 45(2) of Directive 2004/18 (Opinion in C-171/15, paras 51-52, references omitted and emphasis added).

In my view, it must be right that contracting authorities are always under a general obligation of acting in a proportionate manner and, consequently, each decision they adopt needs to be proportionate under the circumstances and pro-competitive, and ultimately 'a contracting authority must retain the power to assess, on a case-by-case basis, the gravity of the circumstances that would lead to exclusion of the tenderer. And it is submitted that it must also balance them against the effects that such exclusion would have on competition' [see A Sanchez-Graells, Public procurement and the EU competition rules, 2nd edn (Oxford, Hart, 2015) 293, references omitted]. Thus, the final consideration of AG Campos seems entirely correct when he stresses that

In the invitation to tender at issue, the conditions and the selection procedure, the same for all applicants, were not modified. The contracting authority checked that their tenders satisfied the criteria applicable to the contract and applied no ground for exclusion which was not provided for in the descriptive document. The fact that, in order to assess one of those grounds for exclusion expressly included in that document it applied the criterion of proportionality, which was not expressly referred to in the descriptive document but is required by the general ... rules on public procurement (as well as by the case-law of the Court), is, in my view, consistent with the principle of equal treatment and its corollary, the obligation to act transparently (Opinion in C-171/15, para 58, references omitted and emphasis added).

The more difficult issue of the standard of (intensity) of judicial review

The second question fundamentally focuses on the fact that, given the contracting authority's engagement in a proportionality analysis, a mere 'marginal' review of the decision in order to ascertain whether the contracting authority could reasonably have come to the decision not to exclude a tenderer could fall short of meeting the requirements of the Remedies Directive.

After some interesting remarks on the gradual increase in the requirements of intensity of judicial review in areas of EU substantive law where there has been a harmonisation of remedies--which, consequently, reduce the scope of limitations derived from the general principle of procedural autonomy--AG Campos enounces what he considers should be covered by a mechanism of review compliant with the Remedies Directive. In his view,

the judicial review imposed by Directive 89/665 requires something more [than a mere 'marginal' review, or solely assessing whether or not the contested decision was arbitrary] to deserve that name. The assessment by the court cannot end with a mere assessment of the ‘reasonableness’ of the contested decisions, especially as those decisions must comply with detailed rules covering formal and substantive matters. A court hearing an application in this field will have to assess whether the disputed award observed the rules of the invitation to tender and whether the successful tenderer’s application can withstand the critical analysis which its competitors present in the action. That assessment will require, in many cases, verification of the decisive facts (which the administration may have determined incorrectly), as well as evidence concerning the relative merits of the various applications. It will also involve gauging whether the administrative action is duly reasoned and whether it is in line or at variance with the objectives which underlie it (in other words, whether there is evidence of misuse of powers) and the other legal provisions which govern it. Examination of all that evidence goes beyond, I repeat, a mere assessment of the ‘reasonableness’ of the contested measure and involves matters of fact and law of a more ‘technical’ and usually more complex nature, which every court having jurisdiction to review administrative acts usually carries out (Opinion in C-171/15, para 73, emphasis added). 

This leads him to suggest to the Court to declare that 

Articles 1 and 2 of Council Directive 89/665/EEC of 21 December 1989 on the coordination of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions relating to the application of review procedures to the award of public supply and public works contracts are not compatible with legislation, or the usual practice, of a Member State which limits the scope of the review procedures to a review merely of the reasonableness of the decisions of contracting authorities (Opinion in C-171/15, para 85, emphasis added).

On principle, this seems unobjectionable and, as AG Campos suggests, it would also be compatible with the CJEU decision in Croce Amica One Italia (C-440/13, EU:C:2014:2435, see comment here), where it effectively clarified that

Article 1(1) of Directive 89/665 requires the decision of the contracting authority withdrawing the invitation to tender for a public contract to be open to a review procedure, and to be capable of being annulled, where appropriate, on the ground that it has infringed EU law on public contracts or national rules transposing that law (para 34).

The question is whether (all) the specific details of the full review advanced by AG Campos in para 73 of his Opinion are necessary in order to allow the review body or court to assess compatibility of procurement decisions with EU law and domestic transposing measures. As I read his Opinion, he advocates for three main components: (1) a review of the decisive facts, (2) a review of the relative merits of the offers, (3) a review of the reasons given by the contracting authority for its choices and the soundness of those reasons (or, in his own words, to check that there has been no misuse of powers). In my view, elements (1) and (3) are relatively uncontroversial. However, element (2) is very likely to create difficulties if the review body or court is expected (or empowered) to second guess the technical evaluation of the tenderers and their tenders. I think that the risk of allowing review courts and bodies to substitute the contracting authority's discretion for their own would be going a step too far. Thus, while the minimum requirements of the review procedures mandated by the Remedies Directive clearly seem to indicate the need to go beyond a mere assessment of arbitrariness and engage in a full review of legality, it also seems clear to me that the review cannot go as far as to allow for a second-guessing of the contracting authority's discretion. 

This is clearly an area where drawing bright lines is complicated or, as AG Fennelly put it writing extra judicially,

There remains a somewhat imprecise formulation of the standard of substantive review. Respect, to the extent appropriate, is paid to the discretion of the awarding authority. Nonetheless, the cases show that the intensity of scrutiny is greater than in traditional cases, where judges have been very slow to substitute their own evaluation of the facts for that of the decision-maker. In tendering, it is natural, other things being equal, to expect the contract to be awarded to the lowest price. Even where the criterion adopted is the “most economically advantageous,” there will usually be an identifiable lowest price. It will normally be incumbent on the authority to claim that other things are not equal and to show why. Thus, the substantial justification for the decision shades into the adequacy of the reasons, even if sufficiency of reasons is usually treated as a separate ground of judicial review (emphasis added). 

It may well be that this discussion is more about the semantics than substance of how to describe the standard for judicial review. Be it as it may, however, it will be interesting to await for the final decision of the Court in the Connexxion Taxi Services case, which hopefully will bring some clarity on the specific requirements of intensity of judicial review that stem from the Remedies Directive.