Brussels, 26/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission took the decision on Thursday 26 February not to pursue the case against Poland for failure to transpose Directive 2009/28/EC on promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources that member states were supposed to have incorporated into national law by 5 December 2010 at the latest.
The Commission sent Poland a letter of formal notice in January 2011, followed by a reasoned opinion in March 2012, before referring the matter to the Court of Justice in March 2013 for complete absence of transposition. The penalty initially proposed was €133,228.80 per day.
Since Poland transposed some of the provisions of the text during the procedure, the Commission narrowed down the scope of the application to the obligations which were still missing and reduced the proposed penalty to €61,380 per day. A hearing before the court took place on 7 October 2014 and Advocate General Melchior Wathelet delivered his opinion on 11 December.
For the sake of consistency, the Commission has decided to follow normal practice: where only a daily penalty has been proposed, pending cases before the Court are withdrawn if the member state complies with the obligation to transpose the provisions of the directive concerned into national law. Poland gave notification of full transposition of the renewables directive on 29 January. (Emmanuel Hagry)