Brussels, 25/10/2011 (Agence Europe) - In a ruling handed down on Tuesday 25 October (Cases C-109/10 P and C-110/10 P) the Court of Justice of the EU annulled two Commission decisions dating from December 2000 (2003/5/EC and 2003/6/EC) imposing fines of €20 million and €3 million on the Solvay company for abuse of its dominant position and for taking part in a cartel on the soda ash market, and the rulings of the General Court of December 2009 (T-58/01 and T-59/01) upholding these decisions.
Those decisions were substantively identical in content to decisions adopted by the Commission in 1990 which had been annulled in 1995 by the General Court - upheld by the Court of Justice in 2000 - on the grounds that they had not been properly authenticated. The Commission restarted the procedure, but failed to provide Solvay with all the files in the case, some sub-files having gone missing. It also adopted new decisions without opening new administrative proceedings or first giving Solvay a hearing.
Solvay, then, brought separate actions on these two points but the General Court upheld the decisions, ruling: - that the fact that Solvay had not had access to all the documents covered by the investigation had not prevented it from defending itself; - that the new Commission decisions were framed in terms substantively identical to those of the 1990 decisions and that, accordingly, the Commission was not required to hear Solvay again.
The Court of Justice ruled against the General Court. It found that the General Court had erred in law on two points: - in concluding that the fact that Solvay had not had access to all the documents in the file did not constitute an infringement of its rights of defence, as some of the missing sub-files could have contained essential documents relating to the procedure before the Commission which might have been relevant to Solvay's defence; - in ruling that the Commission did not require to hear the company before taking its decisions. In this case, the question of the hearing of Solvay cannot be separated from the issue of access to the file, the Court found. In the 1990 decisions, annulled on the grounds of lack of proper authentification, the Commission had not granted Solvay access to all the documents in its file. Despite that, it adopted identical decisions in 2000 without opening new administrative proceedings in which it would have had to hear Solvay after granting it access to the file. Consequently, the Court set aside the judgments of the General Court and annulled the decisions of the Commission. (FG/transl.rt)