Success! Favorable ruling for the Law Firm’s client in a case concerning a negative assessment of a grant applicatio
9 July 2025 • Autor: Kancelaria Brysiewicz Bokina i Wspólnicy
Our client – an entrepreneur operating in the aesthetic medicine industry – submitted an application for product innovation funding as part of the support for SMEs in response to the crisis caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus. When assessing the application, the Intermediate Body decided that the project, worth almost PLN 1.5 million, did not meet the substantive access criteria and, consequently, it should be assessed negatively and not recommended for funding.
Thanks to the support of the Law Firm’s lawyers – legal advisor Magdalena Porzeżyńska and trainee attorney Małgorzata Woźniak – the assessment of the application was appealed against to the WSA in Łódź as infringing the provisions of the Implementation Act [1]. In particular, the complaint accused the Authority of evaluating the application in an arbitrary manner, imposing requirements on the applicant that did not stem from the competition documentation, and reading the application selectively rather than holistically, which resulted in a lack of a reliable and objective evaluation of the project. This is because the Intermediate Body’s assessment was based on assumptions that did not result from the content of the application for co-financing, and the requirements placed on the Applicant did not result directly from the competition documentation, but were based on generalised theses and arbitrary assessments, with the result that the Body acted inconsistently with the project selection procedure.
The Provincial Administrative Court in Łódź, in its final judgment, upheld the arguments of the Law Firm and stated that the project had been evaluated in violation of the provisions of the implementing act, in particular that it did not comply with the principles of transparency, reliability, and impartiality of project selection, as well as equality of applicants in access to information on the rules and method of selecting projects for co-financing. The adjudicating panel emphasized that the competition rules cannot be contrary to generally applicable law, and the requirements for applicants do not strictly result from the content of the criteria subject to evaluation:
It is unacceptable for the project assessment under a given admissibility criterion to refer to requirements that are not included in the criterion description. In particular, it is unacceptable that these criteria are de facto formulated (specified) only at the stage of assessment, and therefore, by their very nature, could not have been known to the applicant when preparing the project and submitting the application, which was the case here (...) For the purposes of the assessment, no expectations could be formulated with regard to the applicant, going beyond the framework of the competition requirements as to meeting certain criteria. In fact, all the evaluation criteria should be clear and precisely defined already at the stage of announcing the competition, as any exceeding of their margin results in the lack of transparency of the competition and unreliability and arbitrariness of the institution conducting it" [2]
Following the final court ruling, the funding application will be reassessed by the Authority, but with the need to take into account the considerations of the court in the quoted judgment.
In the proceedings concerning an erroneous negative evaluation of a grant application, it is very important to emphasise that the administrative court is competent not only to verify whether the applicant met the formal conditions, but also whether the experts' evaluation is not arbitrary and arbitrary, whether it was based on the precise content of the competition documentation, and whether it was correctly and comprehensively justified by the authority, in particular with regard to the score not awarded or reduced. Institutions granting support at the stage of assessment often try to 'patch up' imprecisely defined assessment criteria, formulating requirements that do not stem from the competition documentation or interpreting it to their advantage, or even contrary to generally applicable law. For this reason, we always recommend the appeal path available to applicants against a negative project assessment". - Legal trainee Małgorzata Woźniak emphasises
[1] Act of 11 July 2014 on the principles for the implementation of programmes within the scope of cohesion policy financed in the financial perspective 2014-2020 (i.e. Journal of Laws of 2020, item 818, as amended; “Implementation Act”).
[2] Judgment of the WSA in Łódź of 18 November 2021. (ref: III SA/Łd 729/21).
Zadaj pytanie autorowi
