On 15 July 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter the ECJ or the Court) handed down a preliminary ruling regarding the possibility for a public authority to discard the highest offer in a bidding procedure and sell at a lower price. The ECJ ruled that an offer which seems grossly disproportionate with the market price can be discarded without necessarily triggering State aid. The explicit reasoning of the Court does not in our view allow to fully understand the outcome of the case; we therefore provide below a personal explanation of the solution adopted by the Court.
Keywords: Public Sales of Land; Market Value; Market Economy Investor Princple.