Brussels, 28/02/2013 (Agence Europe) - In rulings delivered on Thursday 28 February, following actions brought by the Commission, the EU Court of Justice ruled against Hungary and Spain for failing to respect the directives governing the way in which the rail sector operates (directives 91/440/EEC and 2001/14/EEC). Austrian and German legislation in this area, however, was found to comply with existing legislation (Cases 555/10 and 556/10). The Court finds against these two countries for breaching the 2001/14/EEC directive (sharing of rail infrastructure capacity and infrastructure pricing): - Hungary (C-473/10), which failed to define the conditions guaranteeing the financial balance of infrastructure managers and did not adopt incentive measures to reduce costs and fees linked to the use of this infrastructure; - it also failed to guarantee that the fees deducted by the infrastructure managers equalled the costs directly used for rail services. On the other hand, contrary to the Commission submission, the Court decided that rail traffic management could be overseen by the established Hungarian rail companies because it was not an essential function that should be overseen by an independent manager: - Spain: for getting the state to ensure fees were paid for the use of rail infrastructure, as well as the right, in the event of overlapping requests for the same time slots or network saturation, to determine distribution priorities for the different kinds of services on each line, whilst taking into account freight services. The Court said that this involves essential services that should be exercised by an independent rail infrastructure manager. By maintaining effective network use as criteria for sharing infrastructure capacity in the event of request overlaps for the same time slots or network saturation, Spanish legislation breaches the said directive, in so far as the effective taking into account of the network is not subject to the conclusion of the framework agreement between the infrastructure manager and the rail company. The Court considers that this distribution criterion is discriminatory in so far as it leads to maintaining competitive advantage for established users and blocks access to the most attractive timeslots for new market entries.
Commissioner Kallas welcomed these judgements and said that, “the Court clearly established that track access charges must be set independently by the infrastructure manager, and not by the State, and also that the infrastructure manager may only charge direct costs for the use of the tracks”. (FG/transl.fl)