Brussels, 20/01/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 20 January, the European Commission ordered the recovery by the Region of Wallonia, in Belgium, of a total of €211 million in funding granted between 2006 and 2011 to a number of steel companies of the group Duferco. The Commission has identified five beneficiaries: the holding company of Duferco, a steel subsidiary named Duferco Industrial Investment, a joint venture between Duferco and the Novolipetsk group, named Steel Invest & Finance (now wholly owned by par Novolipetsk), and two joint ventures with FSIH in Belgium, Duferco Salvage Investments and Duferco Long Products.
This artificial support “artificially boosted the companies' revenues and postponed the difficult, but unavoidable, capacity adjustments of steel production in Wallonia”, the Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, explained at a press conference. At the end of the in-depth investigation, the Commission concluded that no private investor would have agreed to invest under the same conditions as Foreign Strategic Investments Holding (FSIH), a public body controlled by the government of Wallonia. The public money therefore confers a selective advantage which was not available to competitors, which were obliged to operate without a similar subsidy.
“The aid granted to the Duferco group companies did not prevent the steel plants in Wallonia to pull out from productions and dismiss all the workers already in 2013”, Vestager said, adding that the Commission is using funds from the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund to support Wallonia's efforts to retrain the workers who were made redundant. (Original version in French by Elodie Lamer)