Facts
The City of Zurich planned to renovate the Moos lake water treatment plant and publicly tendered the engineering services for planning and project design. In addition to other award criteria such as quality, references and qualifications, the City of Zurich also evaluated the fee offer, whereby it provided for a sub-criterion "plausibility" with a weighting of 20%. The unsuccessful applicant X. AG filed a complaint against the award decision in favor of Y. GmbH, as it considered the evaluation of the sub-criterion "plausibility" to be inadmissible.Considerations
The Federal Supreme Court concluded that the sub-criterion "plausibility" was admissible in the specific design. The City of Zurich thereby did not evaluate the offer price as such, but the services covered by the offer according to objective criteria. In doing so, it moved within its discretionary margin protected by municipal autonomy in the field of public procurement. The use of the…