The Grand Chamber (Judge Juhász) reaffirmed that in competition
law the actual facts on the ground are all that matter, regardless of anyone’s
intentions. In this case, both the lawyers and the Austrian Kartellgericht
said that the cartel in question was permitted, but that does not prevent the
Austrian authorities from fining them anyway 15 years later. Bundeswettbewerbsbehörde and Bundeskartellanwalt v.
Schenker et al. Cf. European Law Blog
The Grand Chamber (Judge Ó Caoimh) also gave the Czech Republic a
€ 250.000 lump sum fine for failure to comply with an – otherwise boring –
infringement judgment. Commission
v. Czech Republic
Guillermo Cañas’s attempt to marshal the forces of EU competition
law against the world anti-doping agency WADA and against the ATP failed before
the Court of Justice (Judge Bay Larsen) as it had before the
Commission and the
General Court. The problem continues to be that
the applicant, having retired, no longer has an interest in fact in the
dispute. Cañas v. Commission (FR)
In Impacto
Azul Lda v. BPSA 9 et al., the Court
(Judge Lõhmus) held that art. 49 TFEU allows national legislation that
“excludes the application of the principle of the joint and several liability
of parent companies vis-à-vis the creditors of their subsidiaries to parent
companies having their seat in the territory of another Member State”, because
the parent can easily contract around this.
The Court (Judge Rosas) agreed with AG
Mengozzi that Luxembourg had discriminated
impermissibly against foreign students in its system for financial aid.
However, the way it got there was quite different. Giersch
et al. v. Luxembourg Cf. Eutopia
Law blog
Now that all the easy cases on mutual recognition of professional
qualifications are dealt with, it’s time to move on to more difficult
situations. In Nasiopoulos
v. Ipourgos Igias kai Pronoias
we have a German-trained Greek medical masseur-hydrotherapist (‘Masseur und
medizinischer Bademeister’) who wants to work as a physiotherapist in Greece.
While the Court (Judge Levits) agrees that that is a bit of a stretch, it
thinks he should at least be allowed to practice that part of the profession
that he is actually qualified for.
In the joined cases VG
Wort v. Kyocera et al. and Fujitsu and HP v. VG Wort,
the Court (Judge Malenovský) gave some guidance on art. 5(2)(b) and 6 of Directive
2001/29, the copyrights directive. As it
turns out, printer manufacturers can be sued for some of the total “fair
compensation” owed for all those naughty internet users printing off books in
their attics, but not all of it.
The Court (Judge Jarašiūnas) signed off on a Maltese excise duty on
mobile telephone use, concluding that neither art. 12 nor art. 13 of the Authorisation
Directive applied to such a “consumption
tax”. Vodafone
Malta et al. v. Avukat Ġenerali et al.
AG Jääskinen, quoting pre-Supreme Court Louis Brandeis, argued
that there is no general “right to be forgotten” under existing EU data
protection law. The defendants wanted an allegedly incorrect search result
deleted from Google. Google
v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja González Cf. UK Human Rights Blog and European Law Blog
AG Mengozzi has a state aid case in national court, where Deutsche
Lufthansa complained about alleged state aid from Frankfurt-Hahn airport to
Ryanair. As a result of this litigation, the Commission decided to get
interested, with the result that the standstill clause of art.
108(3) TFEU came into effect. Given that the
German court doesn’t necessarily agree that there is unlawful state aid here –
the case was initially rejected by the Landgericht – the question is what the
distribution of responsibilities and obligations is between the Commission, the
national court and, potentially, the ECJ. Deutsche Lufthansa v. Flughafen
Frankfurt-Hahn (NL,
DE,
FR)
For whatever reason, they let AG Kokott near one of those classic
legal basis & common commercial policy cases. (Cf. my LL.M. thesis, long
ago, here.)
The case is about this
Council of Europe convention.
The Commission wants the EU to ratify it based on the normal rules of the
common commercial policy under art.
207 TFEU, while the Council prefers a
mixed agreement based on art.
114 TFEU. Curiously, the AG argues –
correctly – that art.
3(2) TFEU codifies the ERTA doctrine, but
then uses that to conclude that the EU’s competence in this area is not only
exclusive, but also based on art. 207 TFEU. Commission
v. Council
The General Court rejected two action for annulment in the Aluminium
Fluoride cartel case. Most creatively, one of the
applicants – ICF from Tunisia – tried to plead art. 36 of the Euro-Mediterranean
agreement between the EU and Tunisia
from 1998 as a grounds of invalidity. Unsurprisingly, the Court did not go for
that one. ICF v. Commission (FR)
and Fluorsid
SpA and Minmet Financing v. Commission
No comments:
Post a Comment