Brussels, 21/11/2013 (Agence Europe) - In a legal opinion published on Thursday 21 November in case C-559/12 P, the European Court of Justice Advocate General suggests that the court reject France's appeal against the ruling of the European General Court in case T-154/10 (of 2012) validating the European Commission's 2010 decision that the implicit unlimited guarantee from the French state for La Poste amounts to illegal state aid.
The Commission says that the fact of being a public enterprise of an industrial or commercial nature enabled the French post office, La Poste, to avoid the law (until 2010) that applies in the event of the liquidation of struggling private companies. It therefore benefitted from an implicit and unlimited financial guarantee from the French state for all its commitments, giving it an economic advantage over its private competitors. The guarantee was to be scrapped at the end of March 2010.
The advocate general said that the General Court's ruling was justified as it had correctly assessed the existence of the implicit state guarantee and the fact that it amounted to state aid, despite the problem of detecting it because it is not covered by legislation. Under case law, state intervention is considered as aid if it reduces the burden on a company's budget in whatever way, thus acting like or having identical effects to subsidies in the strict sense, explains the advocate general. The General Court says that the Commission had demonstrated the existence of competitive advantage for La Poste, using the index bundle method to assess the different effect of legislation on La Poste and its competitors, the impact on lenders in the event of bankruptcy and data and methods used by credit rating agencies. (FG/transl.fl)