Тендерна документація (tender documentation, Ukraine)

What must be in it

Article 22(1) requires the documentation to be published free of charge together with the notice, in the electronic system, for general access, by completing fields in the system. It expressly is not an object of copyright — you may reuse it freely.

Article 22(2) lists what it must state:

1. instructions for preparing bids;

2. one or more qualification criteria under Article 16, the exclusion grounds under Article 17, and how compliance is to be evidenced — including the terms for consortia;

3. the required technical, quality and quantitative characteristics, including the technical specification and, where needed, plans, drawings or a description;

4. marking, test reports or certificates proving conformity, where needed;

5. the quantity of goods and place of delivery;

6. where works or services are to be performed, and their volume;

7. delivery and performance periods;

8. the draft contract, which must state how its terms may be changed;

9. a description of any lots that may be bid for separately;

10. the evaluation criteria and methodology with the weight of each — and, where life-cycle cost is used, a description of every cost element and the documents bidders must supply;

11. the bid validity period, not less than 90 days from the bid deadline;

12. the currency of the bid price;

13. the language or languages of bids;

14. the bid deadline;

15. the amount and conditions of bid security, if required;

16. the amount, type, term and conditions of performance security, including return and forfeiture, if required;

17. the name, position and e-mail address of the buyer's contact person or persons;

18. a requirement to name any subcontractor taking 20 per cent or more of the contract value, for works or services;

19. a description and examples of formal (non-substantive) errors that will not cause rejection — defined as technical errors and typos relating to the presentation of the bid that do not affect its substance.

Two prohibitions follow. Article 22(4) bars requirements that restrict competition or discriminate, and bars demanding documentary proof of information that is already public open data or held in freely accessible state registers. Article 22(5) bars requiring a stamp or wet signature on documents already submitted electronically under a qualified electronic signature.

Article 23 governs the specification itself: it may be framed as performance or functional requirements, and must not reference a specific brand, manufacturer, patent, type, origin or production method unless the reference is justified and accompanied by "or equivalent".

What martial law adds

Point 28 of the Особливості (Resolution 1178) says the documentation is formed under Article 22 with the Особливості taken into account, then adds requirements that change how you bid.

The most commercially significant: the buyer must state whether it will consider a bid priced above the expected value published in the notice. If it will, it must state the acceptable percentage of excess. If it does not state either, or your excess is larger than the stated percentage, your bid is rejected under point 44. Read this before you price.

Point 28 also replaces the Article 17 exclusion grounds with those in point 47, and requires the documentation to specify how a non-resident bidder proves its ultimate beneficial ownership — names, all citizenships held, the founder's name, location and identification code, and the nature and extent of the beneficial interest. As under the Law, the buyer may not demand documentary proof where the information is open data, sits in an open public register, or can be obtained by the system through data exchange with other state systems.

Questions, changes and the correction window

Point 54 gives any person the right to ask for clarification of the documentation or the notice, or to demand that a breach be corrected, up to three days before the bid deadline. Requests are published without identifying who asked. The buyer must answer within three days. If it amends the documentation, it must extend the deadline so at least four days remain, publish the new version alongside the old one, and publish a separate list of the changes; machine-readable changes go up within one day of the decision. If the buyer answers late, the system automatically suspends the tender until it answers and extends the deadline by at least four more days.

After bids open, point 43 lets the buyer demand correction of discrepancies in your documents, posted at least two working days before the end of the review period. Point 44 then makes failure to correct within 24 hours — or changing the offered item's name, brand or model while correcting — a mandatory rejection.

What a bidder should actually do

Read in this order: the excess-price paragraph, the evaluation methodology, the point 47 exclusion grounds and how they must be evidenced, the draft contract, and then the technical specification. The first four decide whether bidding is worth it; the fifth decides how you write.

Map every required document to an owner and a lead time before you commit. The 90-day minimum bid validity means anything time-limited must remain valid across that period, and the 24-hour correction rule leaves no time to obtain something new.

Use the clarification process rather than complaining first. A well-framed question published three days out often produces an amendment, and an amendment resets the deadline by at least four days.

If that fails, note the hard limit: a complaint about the documentation must reach the Antimonopoly Committee no later than four days before the bid deadline, and provisions nobody challenges in time can no longer be challenged at all.

Related terms

• Law 922-VIII — Ukraine's Public Procurement Act
• Відкриті торги з особливостями (open tendering with peculiarities, Ukraine)
• АМКУ — the Antimonopoly Committee as Ukraine's procurement appeal body
• Особливості (CMU Resolution 1178) — Ukraine's martial-law procurement overlay

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