Category Archives: Duty to state reasons

Case T-320/09 Planet AE v Commission: Lack of Legal Basis, Breach of Rights of Defence, Lack of Reasons

Leave a reply

The General Court has handed down a number of interesting judgments lately and we need to catch up after a blogging hiatus.

Let’s start with the judgment of 22 April 2015  in Case T‑320/09 Planet AE Anonymi Etairia Parochis Simvouleftikon Ipiresion v Commission, EU:T:2015:223, in which the Court annulled a series of decisions of the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) requesting the applicant’s registration in the early warning system (‘EWS’) put in place to ostensibly protect the EU’s financial interests.

The interest of the case lies in the fact that the judgment is a sort of text book case of judicial review.  The Court annulled the Commission decisions taken by OLAF on a number of grounds:

  • the Commission had no powers to adopt the measures challenged,
  • the Commission breached the fundamental rights of the applicant,
  • the decisions were not properly reasoned.

Continue reading →

Case T-355/13 easyJet Airline Co. Ltd. v Commission: Complaints, Abuse and National Competition Authority

Leave a reply

The judgment of the General Court of 21 January 2015 in EasyJet Airline Co. Ltd. v Commission, T-355/13, EU:T:2015:36, contains some interesting things about:

  • the Commission’s discretion to reject complains about breaches of the competition rules and judicial review of that discretion on the one hand and how the Commission and
  • how national competition authorities interact in the framework of the “European Competition Network” on the other.

A few facts first.

Continue reading →

Cases C-89/08 P and C-272/12 P Commission v Ireland and Others: The EU law principles in the Eurallumina saga – Part 1

1 Reply

In the following posts we are going to have a look at the saga of the Eurallumina cases, and in particular the judgments of the Court of Justice in Case C-89/08 P of 2 December 2009 and Case C-272/12 P of 10 December 2013 Commission v Ireland and Others. These judgments touch upon important principles of EU law such as legal certainty, the duty to state reasons, the ability of the EU Courts to raise pleas sua sponte, the right of the parties to be heard, the protection of legitimate expectations and the presumption of legality of EU measures as well interesting issues such as the relationship between tax harmonisation and monitoring of State aid and the separation of powers between the Council and the Commission.

Continue reading →