Council of State, sec. VI, 04.06.2024 n. 4996
16. As clarified by this Council of State (section III, 15.11.2023 n. 9812 and 26.03.2024 n. 286), even if the “result principle” was only recently made explicit by the new Public Contracts Code of 2023, this principle was already “immanent” to the system of the so-called result administration (attributed to the principle of good performance of administrative activityeven before the express statement contained in theart. 1 of Legislative Decree no. 36 of 2023). Consequently, the result can be adopted by the Judge as a guiding criterion also for cases in which doubts about the fate of public procedures not governed by Legislative Decree no. need to be resolved. 36/2023 (State Council, section V, 02.27.2024 n. 1924). The administration, therefore, must aim for the best possible result, in “defence” of thepublic interest for which a public procedure is envisaged, since it concerns, as the aforementioned jurisprudence has authoritatively taught, “a principle considered as the dominant value of the public interest to be pursued (…) and which excludes the administrative action from being nullified where it cannot be identify effective reasons that prevent the achievement of the final objective (…).” Said principle, in the case that occupies the section, is the need to favor the effective and timely achievement of the objectives of the public action, taking into consideration the substantial factors of the administrative activity, excluding that it is nullified. The prevalence of substantial aspects, compared to purely formal ones, in the context of the public tender procedure, has been recognized on several occasions by jurisprudence, even before Legislative Decree no. 36/2023. For the Administrative Judge, the principle of the result represents the interpretative criterion to be used to resolve cases of conflict between the “formal data” of slavish compliance with the notice and the “substantial data” of the suitability of the economic operator’s shareholdings (and therefore of the the administration’s substantial interest in the rapid realization of the public good, which in this case appears to be the digital transition, even if the lex specialis has not regulated all possible aspects on the location of the plants, but it is clear that the main objective is the switching off of the frequencies and their liberation). The principle of the result must not, however, be placed in an antagonistic way with respect to the principle of legality….
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 – Association of Municipal and Provincial Secretaries){kind=link}