## 3 EVALUATION AND AWARD 

The evaluation of the tenders that comply with the submission conditions will consist of the following elements: 

 Check if the tenderer has access to procurement (see Section 2.2 ); 

Verification of administrative compliance (if the tender is drawn up in one of the official EU languages and signed by duly authorised representative(-s) of the tenderer); 

 Verification of non-exclusion of tenderers on the basis of the exclusion criteria; 

 Selection of tenderers on the basis of selection criteria; 

Verification of compliance with the minimum requirements defined in the Tender specifications; 

 Evaluation of tenders on the basis of the award criteria. 

The Contracting authority will evaluate the abovementioned elements in the order that it considers to be the most appropriate. If the evaluation of one or more elements demonstrates that there are grounds for rejection, the tender will be rejected and will not be subjected to further full evaluation. The unsuccessful tenderers will be informed of the ground for rejection without being given feedback on the non-assessed content of their tenders. Only tenderer(s) for whom the verification of all elements did not reveal grounds for rejection can be awarded the contract. 

The evaluation will be based on the information and evidence contained in the tenders and, if applicable, on additional information and evidence provided at the request of the Contracting authority during the procedure. If any of the declarations or information provided proves to be false, the Contracting authority  may impose administrative sanctions (exclusion or financial penalties) on the entity providing the false declarations/information. 

For the purposes of the evaluation related to exclusion and selection criteria the Contracting authority  may also refer to publicly available information, in particular evidence that it can access on a national database free of charge. 

## 3.1 Exclusion criteria 

The objective of the exclusion criteria is to assess whether the tenderer is in any of the exclusion situations listed in Article 136(1) of the Financial Regulation. 

As evidence of non-exclusion each tenderer needs to submit with its tender a Declaration on Honour 24 in the model available in Annex 2 . 25 The declaration must be signed by an authorised representative of the entity providing the declaration. 

