Client Success: Exhaustion of funds in the competition did not justify the refusal of a grant.

On September 4, 2019, the Supreme Administrative Court (judgment ref. no. I GSK 1391/19) overturned the ruling of the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Szczecin, which had dismissed the applicant’s complaint regarding the negative evaluation of its project, and referred the case back to that court for reconsideration. The case concerned an application for EU funding from the European Social Fund. The institution had three times refused to grant funding to the applicant—a company organizing training courses and workshops—claiming that the competition funds had been exhausted, and that a score correction in favor of the applicant, resulting in an equal score to previously funded projects, did not justify awarding funding, as it would require financing several other projects that had also received the same number of points during the appeals process.
Despite an earlier binding judgment ordering the institution to re-examine the case and analyze the availability of funds at the time the protest was reviewed—understood as “binding allocation” of funds based on signed grant agreements with entities on the ranking list—the authority again refused to fund the applicant’s project. The competition’s fund pool amounted to PLN 15 million, and at the time of the court’s ruling, over PLN 7 million had been contracted. However, the authority argued that the remaining funds would not suffice to support the applicant’s project because it would also require financing eleven other projects that had scored 130 points during the appeals process, which would amount to unequal treatment of other applicants. The Szczecin Administrative Court agreed with this reasoning and dismissed the applicant’s subsequent complaint.
The Supreme Administrative Court overturned that decision, supporting the applicant’s arguments and ordering the Szczecin court to reconsider the case. The SAC pointed out, among other things, that the lower court failed to address key allegations significant to the case outcome—namely, that agreements had been signed with five applicants whose projects received 130 points. This situation clearly suggests a possible violation of the principle of equality. The company’s project, initially rated at 127 points due to the authority’s error and later upgraded to 130 after appeal, was not funded. The applicant rightly argues that more than two years after the competition results, it is highly likely that not all applicants with the same score as the complainant would still be interested in signing grant agreements. It is unjustified to base a funding refusal solely on the hypothetical assumption that all applicants scoring 130 points would have signed agreements. This is especially true—undisputed in this case—given that the applicant was the only one among those who received 130 points after the appeals procedure to actively pursue a legal challenge of the project assessment.
The full text of the judgment is available here: http://orzeczenia.nsa.gov.pl/doc/E8B80F4E28
The applicant was represented in these proceedings by legal advisors Krzysztof Brysiewicz and Dr. Magdalena Porzeżyńska.