By Joanna Frost
1st Sep 2015
The European Court ruled on a case referred to it by the Romanian Court, where a supplier of computing systems and equipment challenged a contracting authority in Romania for rejecting their tender on the basis that its computing equipment with an AMD 3.6 Ghz processor, was not up to current market standards.
The contracting authority specified a processor corresponding to "at least" an "Intel Core i5 3.2 Ghz or equivalent". During the procurement process the processor market moved on and at the time of the tender evaluation, the manufacturer no longer supported that type of processor and was producing a substantially faster product. The rejected supplier had proposed an AMD processor that complied with the technical specification set out in the ITT, but was inferior to the new Intel processor in production.
The Court ruled that the contracting authority cannot reject a tender which satisfies the requirements of the ITT on grounds which are not set out in the tender specifications.
This case is useful in highlighting two key issues:
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