Public Procurement Review Committee upholds Bouygues consortium and contracting authority in “procurement of the century” dispute

COBALT successfully represented a consortium led by Bouygues Travaux Publics in a dispute concerning the Rail Baltica design and construction project, the “project of the century”.

On 13 March, Rail Baltic Estonia announced that it had selected two international consortiums as the successful bidders in a tender for the construction of the Ülemiste-Pärnu and Pärnu-Latvia border main route. A consortium led by GRK (Alliance 1) was selected to build the Ülemiste-Pärnu section and a consortium consisting of Bouygues Travaux Public, Budimex S.A., INGEROP Conseil et Ingenierie (ICI), KMG Infra OÜ and WSP Finland Oy was selected to build the Pärnu-Latvia border section (Alliance 2).

However, the consortium led by Leonhard Weiss, who came in the third place, contested the contracting authority’s decision regarding the Pärnu-Latvia border main route and considered that it should have been declared the winner in this section.

The dispute before the Public Procurement Review Committee focused on whether the contracting authority correctly evaluated the tenders based on its evaluation methodology and criteria. More specifically, the dispute concerned the legality of the evaluation and the awarding of points based on the evaluation criteria of project management and cooperation capabilities. There was also debate about the extent to which the Public Procurement Review Committee can review the contracting authority’s evaluation decision for a given evaluation criterion. The committee analysed the objections raised by the Leonhard Weiss consortium and the evaluation carried out under the qualitative evaluation criteria. The committee found that Rail Baltic Estonia had correctly evaluated the tenders of the Bouygues consortium and the Leonhard Weiss consortium, and the appeal was therefore dismissed. The decision has not yet entered into force.

The client was advised by Managing Associate Kaidi Reiljan-Sihvart, Specialist Counsel Tavo Tiits, and Procurement specialist Laura Frolov.