Brussels, 10/03/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 10 March, the Court of Justice of the EU decided to annul the decisions made by the European Commission in its investigation into a cartel in the cement sector, as insufficient reasoning had been provided for these decisions, in the view of the judges.
In this judgment (joined cases C-247/14 P, C-248/14 P, C-267/14 P and C-268/14 P), the Court of Justice annulled the judgments of the General Court of the EU, as recommended by Advocate General Nils Wahl (see EUROPE 11411). The appeals brought by, amongst others, the German companies Heidelberg Cement and Schwek Zement and the Italian companies Buzzi Unicem and Italmobiliare were hence considered justified.
The Court called into question the request for detailed responses sent by the Commission in 2011 to a number of companies in the cement sector which were suspected of infringements which included dividing up the market and setting prices. The Court took the view that the decisions in question do not clearly and unequivocally show suspicions of infringements which justified their adoption and do not make it possible to determine whether the information requested was genuinely necessary for the purposes of the investigation. The reasoning behind these decisions was “excessively succinct, vague and generic”, particularly with regard to the considerable scale of the questions put, the judges stressed.
Admittedly, the Commission is not under any obligation to provide highly detailed reasoning in the hearing phase of a case, particularly as regards the precise legal qualification of the suspected infringements. In this case, however, the judges noted that the Commission's reasoning remained excessively vague, even though the procedure had been open for several months and the first inspections had been carried out more than two years previously. (Original in French by Jan Kordys)
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