TRAVELLING WITH DAMAGES, OUT OF THE PUBLIC PROCUREMENT REMEDIES AND INTO COMPARATIVE PUBLIC LIABILITY. FOCUS ON THE ELEMENT OF FAULT

Bidders aggrieved through decisions issued by public authorities during contract award procedures have a right to be awarded damages if the prejudice they suffered was the result of a breach of EU public procurement rules. This is provided under the Directives applicable to remedies in the field of public procurement law. The Remedies Directives created a compact, complex and coordinated system of remedial instruments applicable throughout the Member States. Despite that and unlike all the other remedies, damages are insufficiently regulated and very little coordinated. The remedy’s legal nature and regime are also quite controversial; damages are looked at by EU scholars as an ancillary remedy whose structure and regime should only be of EU law origin and by national judges as a remedy in tort or a classical claim for damages for the administration’s extra contractual liability. In such a complicated scenario, the CJEU, rather than clarifying the nature of the remedy and its exact mechanism, seems moreover to have complicated it by establishing a strict standard of liability. Since the remedy is scarcely regulated and there are no coordinated procedures applied by Member States in order to compensate aggrieved bidders, there have been suggested some sources of inspiration regarding the applicable law. The main one was the doctrine of Member States’ liability for breach of EU law. The study looks at the remedy’s construction at the EU law level and from there, shifts to the domestic legal reality, inquiring both its conceptual framing in the French and English legal orders as well as the way in which French and English national judges integrate and assess such claims. Our inquiry tries to understand which of the two approaches mentioned above should prevail, the EU or the national law approach and it almost immediately suggests the second one and then describes the framing of the claim in the French and the English legal realities. France and the United Kingdom have always had an enormous structural as well as philosophical difference of approach when granting damages for maladministration. These differences seem to suggest that the harmonization in this field is indeed an immense challenge. The very domestic realities framing such mechanisms of redress for damages caused through illegal public procurement decisions impose that effectiveness of the remedy is looked at from within the general national schemes of compensation for illegal administrative action. Still, irrespective of whether equivalence and effectiveness are complied with through the French and the English national mechanisms of redress, the substantial differences of approach from one legal order to another show that a coordination/harmonization intervention is becoming more and more necessary.