Expiration of Coal and Steel Treaty, Antitrust and Legal Bases: Cases T-27/03, T-46/03, T-58/03, T-79/03, T-80/03, T-97/03, T-98/03, T-45/03, T-77/03 and T-94/03

The Court of First Instance has handed down a bucket load of judgments - well, actually three judgments - annulling a Commission decision imposing fines on several Italian producers of reinforcing bars for breaches of the Coal and Steel Treaty antitrust rules.

The Court of First Instance found in Joined Cases T-27/03, T-46/03, T-58/03, T-79/03, T-80/03, T-97/03, T-98/03 SP SpA and others v. Commission and in Case T-45/03 Riva Acciaio SpA v. Commission, Case T-77/03 Ferapli Siderurgica SpA v. Commission and Case T-94/03 Ferriere Nord SpA v. Commission that, at the time the Commission took the decision, it lacked the legal basis to do so. Accordingly it annulled the decision.

What happened was this. The Commission adopted a decision on December 17th 2002, ostensibly based on Article 65 ECSC. That decision fined several Italian enterprises for breaches of Article 65 ECSC. The problem was that the ECSC Treaty had expired on July 23rd 2002. Thus, when the decision was adopted, its legal basis was no longer in effect.

The Court of First Instance held the EC institutions have conferred powers only (Opinion 2/00 of the Court, paragraph 5) and thus every measure adopted by the EC institutions must have a legal basis empowering them to adopt the measure. It made clear that the legal basis must be in force at the time the measure is adopted.

Comments

[new louis vuitton belt]

observation - recently one can notice an increase towards multilinguism (irish becomes official language after 35 years from accession