A Glass Wall Just Sank a €300 Million Tender: Helsinki's Port Tunnel Award Annulled

A €200 to €300 million Finnish infrastructure procurement has to be redone, and the reason is not price, quality or a scoring formula. It is a meeting room with a glass wall.

Quick answer: on 27 August 2026 the Finnish Market Court (markkinaoikeus) annulled the Port of Helsinki's choice of contractor for its harbour tunnel, a contract valued at €200 to €300 million. The court did not find that the winner, Skanska, saw anything. It found that the port's own workshop arrangements left a real possibility that Skanska could have seen the second-placed bidder YIT's confidential material, and that this alone breached the duty to treat bidders equally. The port is barred from signing the contract, on pain of a €5 million penalty. An appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court is possible only with leave, and the ruling must be followed in the meantime.

The ruling in five numbers

• €200 to €300 million: the estimated value of the tunnel contract awarded to Skanska on 11 December 2025 as the economically most advantageous tender
• 4 September 2025: the day YIT held its evaluated workshop at the Olympic Stadium while Skanska rehearsed its own in a room down the corridor
• €5 million: the penalty the court set if the port signs the contract on the annulled decision
• €35,000: the legal costs the port must pay YIT
• 30 days from receiving the decision: the window to seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court

What happened

The Port of Helsinki is building a tunnel of about two kilometres to take all heavy traffic and westbound car traffic from West Harbour underground, beneath Jätkäsaari, Ruoholahti and Kamppi. The port puts the cost at roughly €300 million, to be financed from port charges, with construction due to start in 2028 and finish in 2032. It is run as an alliance project, where client, designers and contractors work as one team and the costs and final scope are settled during a development phase, with the investment decision taken at its end. The contractor was chosen through a negotiated procedure, announced in March 2025, that included workshops in which each bidding team solved tasks set by the port.

Those workshops are where the case was decided. The port booked room 1938 at the Olympic Stadium, a room whose door and corridor wall are glass. YIT worked there on 4 and 5 September 2025. Skanska's team held its workshop on 9 and 10 September, but on 4 September, YIT's first day, it had booked room 1952 on the same floor to rehearse.

YIT's material was pinned to the glass wall, the brick walls beside it and upturned tables. YIT told the court that a Skanska employee walking past could see or could have seen its plans through the glass, including foundation engineering, the shoreline tunnel section, work phasing and the alternatives for the work tunnels. YIT guessed the man had been going out for a cigarette. Skanska replied that he does not smoke, that its people had stayed in their own room and eaten at different times, and that YIT's insinuations were wrong and improper. When the port learned on the morning of 4 September that both teams were in the building, it did not ask Skanska to leave. It agreed timetable and movement arrangements instead.

The port's technical director, Pekka Hellström, told Yle: "The conditions were equal. We completely disagree with the grounds of the appeal." An independent observer who attended the workshops had reported them as balanced, and said the bidders did not learn each other's ideas.

What the court actually decided

The Market Court went to look. It held an on-site inspection of the rooms, which Yle reports as the first in a Finnish procurement appeal, checking the curtains and how much the papers and sticky notes on the glass wall blocked the view from the corridor.

Its finding is precise. Where YIT's papers covered the glass, nobody could see into the room. But with the light from inside, the content of those papers was "clearly observable from the corridor", except for the sticky notes stuck on top of them. The court could not establish from the witnesses whether Skanska actually obtained anything. It did not need to. Under the Finnish utilities procurement act the buyer must ensure that tender content is not revealed before the deadline, and the court held that a procedure can breach equal treatment where there was "a sufficiently concrete danger" of a workshop's content reaching a competitor. Here there was "at least a noteworthy possibility" that it had. The room the port chose, and the arrangements it made that day, "as a whole did not secure the equal and non-discriminatory treatment of bidders". The court also noted that YIT had not been shown to have compromised its own confidentiality.

So the award of 11 December 2025 is annulled. The port may not sign the contract on the strength of it, with a €5 million penalty attached, and must pay YIT €35,000 in costs.

What happens next

The port says it is disappointed, that the ruling delays the tunnel's planning, and that it is now deciding between two options. "We are studying the grounds of the decision and will decide on that basis whether it makes sense to appeal or to restart the competition," Hellström said in the port's statement on the day of the ruling. The appeal route is narrow: leave from the Supreme Administrative Court, sought within 30 days, and granted only where the case matters for legal practice, where there was a clear procedural error, or for another weighty reason. The Market Court's decision must be complied with while any appeal is pending unless the higher court orders otherwise.

What nobody has said yet: which of the two options the port will take, how long the decision will take, and what the delay does to a 2028 construction start.

What to do now

• Competitor in the building during a workshop, site visit or dialogue? Tell the buyer immediately and get its answer in writing.
• Lost an award and something in the process felt uneven? In Finland the standard appeal deadline is 14 days from notification of the decision. Procedural grounds count as much as scoring.
• Sat out the Helsinki tunnel tender? The port is choosing between an appeal and a restart, and the annulment stands in the meantime. Watch for its decision.

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