Brussels, 15/10/2015 (Agence Europe) - In asking four companies which it suspected of involvement in a cartel on the cement sector to respond, in an overly restrictive format, to a questionnaire on the alleged offences, the European Commission went beyond the limits within which it could seek information from the companies.
In his opinion, delivered on Thursday 15 October (joined cases C-247, 248, 267 and 268/14) Advocate General Nils Wahl recommends that the Court of Justice of the EU uphold the appeals lodged, inter alia, by German companies Heidelberg Cement and Schwek Zement and Italian companies Buzzi Unicem and Italmobiliare against the dismissal of their appeals against the Commission demands by the General Court of the EU in March 2014.
He said the appeals of the four companies were founded in that, as the companies argued, the Commission did not properly justify its information requests with regard to the nature of the alleged offences or to the products or geographic markets at issue. Furthermore, the purpose of the information requests was not sufficiently clear, the questions put being extraordinarily numerous and covering very different types of information, sometimes unnecessary, so that it was difficult to identify a connecting thread. In addition, while some questions were too vague, others contained value judgments, such that the risk of providing self-incriminatory answers could not be ruled out (in the cases involving Heidelberg Cement and Buzzi Unicem).
A further complaint accepted by the Advocate General was that, by virtue of the wide range of information sought and because of the very strict response format required, the demands of the Commission imposed a disproportionate workload on the four companies in relation to the information requested. The Advocate General noted the superfluous information that the Commission could have obtained by other means (Heidelberg Cement case); the need to carry out formatting (and reformatting) operations which should, in principle, have been carried out by the Commission itself (Heidelberg and Buzzi cases); the need to compile a vast quantity of data relating to virtually the entire activities of the companies involved in twelve countries and over a period of ten years (Buzzi and Italmobiliare cases). Lastly, in the case of the Italmobiliare holding company, the Commission asked for information on companies it controlled either directly or indirectly rather than directly contacting these implicated companies itself.
For all of the above reasons, Advocate General Wahl recommended that the Court uphold the appeal by the four companies. (Original version in French by Francesco Gariazzo)