The EU Court of Justice upholds the Commission’s decision finding that e-procurement is a service of general interest which can be commercially exploited insofar as the State does not offer the service itself (TenderNed)

In its Judgment of 7 November 2019 in Aanbestedingskalender and Others v Commission, C-687/17 P, EU:C:2019:932 (the ‘TenderNed’ case), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rejected the appeal against the earlier Judgment of the General Court (GC) of 28 September 2017 (T-138/15, EU:T:2017:675) and thus left intact the GC’s upholding of the European Commission’s finding that ‘e-procurement was a service of general interest, and not an inherent economic activity, which could be commercially exploited so long as the State did not offer that service itself’ (T-138/15, para 108, for discussion see the earlier comment in this blog). However, in TenderNed, the CJEU did not rely on the consideration of e-procurement as a service of general interest as such (which is a less than