EStAL 2|2013 Editorial 233 In early May last year the Commission published a short document on what has since become known as the SAM, the State Aid Modernization plan. For the many who had expected more substance to be put into it, these few pages were somewhat disappointing at the time. Almost one year later, Member States and stakeholders have been provided with a lot more, i.e. proposals for new Enabling as well as Procedural Regulations, various issue papers on diverse policy matters such a...

I. Introduction The Court of Justice recently addressed the question whether the State can convert an amount of tax owed by company into equity for that company. This possibility raises a bigger question: can the State can act as a private investor by using fiscal resources which, by their very nature, are not available to private investors? The answers of the Court of Justice to both questions were in the affirmative. In the EDF case, the Court upheld the earlier judgement of the General Court ...

I. Introduction There is something paradoxical about State aid in times of economic crisis. On the one hand, it is understandable that Member States of the European Union seek to help companies in distress and combat rising unemployment. On the other hand, Member States need to control public expenditure in order to avoid further deterioration of their economies and granting State aid can make things even worse. A coordinated and targeted approach by all Member States, however, may help to break...

I. Introduction This paper looks at the State Aid regime put in place by the EU Commission over a relatively short period in late 2008 and 2009 to respond to the initial and most virulent phase of the global financial crisis, at how those rules were applied to financial institutions across the EU, and in particular to Irish banks where the impact of the crisis has been most keenly felt. It commences with a review of the causes of the crisis. One of the main causes was the inadequacy of the regul...

I. Introduction This article outlines the legal findings rendered by the panel and by the Appellate Body (AB) in the WTO Airbus dispute.1 The US launched this case to probe the WTO-consistency of a number of subsidies allegedly bestowed by the EU and four of its Member States – France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom – to Airbus, the European manufacturer of large civil aircrafts (LCA). Due to the breath of the US challenge and to the fact-intensity of the proceedings, this became one ...

It’s a Different Game They Play

The European Union is almost the only international organisation with a system of State aid control. The main reasons for the existence of this system are ensuring a level playing field within the EU internal market, avoiding subsidy races between EU Member States and preserving economic and social welfare. Despite this EU system of control and a WTO agreement documenting a wider international consensus to limit State aid, large amounts of aid are sti...

In this article, the issue of impuability to the State of public undertakings’ decision-making is analysed and discussed in the context of the DSBFirst case. DSBFirst is owned by the independent public undertaking DSB and the private undertaking FirstGroup plc and won the contracts in the 2008 Oeresund tender for the provision of passenger transport by railway. From the start, the services were provided at a loss, and in the end a part of DSBFirst was wound up. In order to frame the problem...

I. Introduction The European Commission launched a major initiative to modernize State aid control,1 and has recently issued draft guidelines on regional State aid for 2014- 2020 (“Draft Regional Aid Guidelines”).2 The related communication stated “An effective internal market requires deployment of . . . competition policy including State aid control to ensure that the functioning of that internal market is not distorted by anticompetitive behaviour of companies or by Member States favour...

The judgement of the General Court in the FagorBrandt case1, 2 (the “Judgement”) relates to the application for annulment of the European Commission (the “Commission”) State aid Decision declaring the compatibility of the restructuring aid of €31 million by France to FagorBrandt subject to conditions (the “Decision”).3 The General Court quashed the Decision on the grounds that the Commission committed a manifest error when assessing the compensatory measures adopted in the case ...

The case at issue is the General Court renvoi from the European Court of Justice (‘ECJ’) British Aggregates case of 2009.1 This case is the final answer of the European Courts to the British Aggregates ‘saga’. The 2006 General Court case has raised much criticism, especially because of the erroneous interpretation of the concept of material selectivity for eco-tax levies.2 The judgment was appealed to the ECJ which annulled the General Court judgment and referred the case back to the ...

The Bonda1 case concerns a reference for a preliminary ruling by the Polish Supreme Court (Sa˛d Najwyz ˙szy) in criminal proceedings against a Polish farmer, Mr. Bonda, on grounds of EU subsidy fraud. On 16 May 16 2005, Bonda lodged an application for a so-called ‘single area payment’, a farm subsidy within the framework of the EU’s common agricultural policy. The amount of a single area payment is calculated in accordance with the type of crop and the size of the farmland in question...

The Court of Justice of the EU (“ECJ” or “Court”), following an established tradition1, has set aside yet another judgment of the General Court in relation to material selectivity of tax measures. In the case at hand, the judgment concerned a system of fiscal neutrality for the transfers of assets between companies put in place by the Italian legislator and a subsequent “tax realignment” mechanism to adjust the tax value of the assets to their book value. Allegedly, the tax realig...

The setting of this case is located in the highly regulated energy sector of Hungary, in which most of the State aid relevant actions took place long before Hungary’s accession to the European Union. Inter alia, the case raises complex questions about the relevant time of assessment, especially with regard to pre-accession measures and therefore also to the correct interpretation of Annex IV to the 2004 Act on Accession, as well as the definition of individual aid in demarcation to aid sche...

On 16 July 2012, the Spanish Supreme Court delivered judgment 4955/20121 which reflects the ex officio obligation of all national courts to assess and grant the most suitable interim measures to safeguard the individual rights of all interested parties, even when illegal aid has already been paid out and the projects for which State aid was awarded have been completely executed. This was the case with the implementation of the necessary measures for the transition from analogue to digital TV ...

Das EU-Beihilferecht – Die Anwendung des EU-Beihilferechts in der Finanzkrise unter juristischökonomischer Betrachtung für die Kreditinstitute EU State Aid Law – The Application of EU State Aid Law in the Financial Crisis from a Legal-Economic Perspective for Credit Institutions By Oliver Michaelis Verlag Dr. Kovacˇ Hamburg 2011, ISBN: 978-3-8300-5498-6, 720 pp., € 138,–

Research Handbook on European State Aid Law By Erika Szys...

434 Report on the 2012 Autumn Conference of the European State Aid Law Institute EStAL 2|2013 Report on the 2012 Autumn Conference of the European State Aid Law Institute Jonas Lybech Jensen* The EStALI Autumn Conference was organised in cooperation with the Faculty of Law of Copenhagen University and took place on 30 November 2012 in the beautiful Alexander Hall situated in the Danish capital’s city centre. I. Introduction As Andreas Bartosch stated during the conference, much can be understo...