Orders nº T-20/20 of Tribunal General de la Unión Europea, March 13, 2020

• Resolution Date: March 13, 2020
• Issuing Organization: Tribunal General de la Unión Europea
• Decision Number: T-20/20

(Application for interim relief - Public supply contracts - Application for interim measures - No urgency)

In Case T-20/20 R,

Intertranslations (Intertransleïsions) Metafraseis AE, established in Kallithea (Greece), represented by N. Korogiannakis, lawyer,

applicant,

v

European Parliament, represented by S. Toliušis and E. Taneva, acting as Agents,

defendant,

APPLICATION pursuant to Articles 278 and 279 TFEU for the grant of interim measures, seeking, first, suspension of the operation of the decisions of the European Parliament of 4 December 2019 to rank the applicant’s tender second in the cascade in lot 5 of the call for tenders for the provision of translation services into English, in connection with the call for tenders TRA/EU19/2019, and to award the first contract resulting from this call for tenders to another tenderer, secondly, suspension of the contract concluded with that other tenderer and, thirdly, an order that the Parliament communicate to the applicant the missing sections of the statement of reasons of the evaluation committee,

THE PRESIDENT OF THE GENERAL COURT

makes the following

Order

Background to the dispute, procedure and forms of order sought by the parties

1 On 18 March 2019, by a contract notice published in the Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ 2019/S 054-123613), the European Parliament launched the open procedure TRA/EU19/2019 to conclude framework contracts for the provision of translation services into Bulgarian (lot 1), Czech (lot 2), Danish (lot 3), Dutch (lot 4), English (lot 5), Estonian (lot 6), Finnish (lot 7), French (lot 8), Greek (lot 9), Hungarian (lot 10), Irish (lot 11), Italian (lot 12), Latvian (lot 13), Lithuanian (lot 14), Maltese (lot 15), Portuguese (lot 16), Slovak (lot 17), Slovenian (lot 18) and Swedish (lot 19).

2 The applicant, the company Intertranslations (Intertransleïsions) Metafraseis AE, to which the Parliament awarded, in 2015, the main framework contract No EN02/2016/MAIN for translation into English, submitted a tender for all lots with the exception of lots 11 and 15.

3 By letter of 28 October 2019, communicated to the applicant by e-mail of the following 29 October, the Director-General of the Directorate-General (DG) for Translation of the Parliament informed the applicant of the results of the preliminary award and confirmed that its tender for lots 2, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16 and 17 had been successful. As regards, in particular, the translation into English (lot 5), the applicant was informed that it was ranked second.

4 By e-mail of 31 October 2019, the applicant sent a request for additional information to the Director-General of the Translation DG of the Parliament concerning each of the lots for which it had submitted a tender.

5 By e-mail of 5 November 2019, the applicant received additional information regarding the results of its tender, inter alia for lot 5, including the description of the methodology used for the evaluation of the translation project management test, the detailed results of that test and the annotated test including the error types indicated in the comments including errors allegedly committed by the applicant as well as tables showing the details of the preliminary award.

6 By e-mail of 13 November 2019, the applicant requested the test correction files with track changes in MS Word version for lots 5, 8 and 12.

7 By e-mail of 14 November 2019, the Parliament replied to the applicant that there was no other document available regarding the evaluation of the test.

8 On 4 December 2019, the Parliament, in the context of the call for tenders TRA/EU19/2019, adopted the decisions concerning lot 5 of the contract for the provision of translation services into English, communicated to all tenderers on 5 December 2019, including the decision to rank the applicant’s tender second in a cascade system, that is to say, a system according to which the secondary contractor receives a translation request only in the event that the main contractor is unable to accept that translation request, and that of awarding the first contract of the cascade system resulting from that invitation to tender to the company Inter Alia UK (together, ‘the contested decisions’).

9 By letter dated 5 December 2019, the Parliament communicated to the applicant the decision to award lots 2, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16 and 17. By that decision, Parliament confirmed to the applicant that its tender for lot 5 had been ranked in second place, receiving a score of 93.43 points.

10 On 16 December 2019, the applicant sent a letter to the Parliament, within the 10-day time limit laid down in the award decision, requesting, first, additional information on the reasons for the decision of the evaluation committee for lot 5 and, second, suspension of the procedure for signing the framework contract.

11 In reply to that letter of 16 December 2019, the applicant received, on the following 20 December, an e-mail from the Parliament informing it that the signing of the contract in question had been suspended in order to verify whether the alleged substantive errors actually existed and whether they could affect the award decision.

12 On 2 January 2020, the applicant addressed the Parliament asking it to confirm the accuracy of the publication in the Official Journal of the...