Brussels, 02/06/2016 (Agence Europe) - In the opinion of European Court of Justice Advocate General Juliane Kokott, issued on Thursday 2 June, Belgium has infringed EU law by allowing ARCO financial cooperatives to join the Belgian savings guarantee system. Kokott says that the European Commission was right to decide in 2014 that the guarantee amounts to unlawful state aid (see EUROPE 11114).
Following collapse of ARCO, the main shareholder of the bank Dexia, the Belgian government decided in 2011 to apply the €100,000 guarantee that was supposed to be restricted to bank deposits (savings) for the 780,000 individuals who had invested their savings in ARCO. The measure had already been taken by the time Belgium notified the measure in November 2011, which itself infringed the obligation on countries to notify the European Commission of state aid in advance.
The Advocate General said, however, that the directive on savings guarantee systems does not oppose such a guarantee in principle, but neither does it require it.
Belgium's constitutional court has to rule on whether the measure amounts to discrimination vis-à-vis Dexia's shareholders (according to Belgian newspaper L'Écho) since the shareholders do not benefit from a public guarantee.
The Advocate General says that Belgium violated both the duty to give prior notification of the aid and the ban on implementing it and had therefore granted unlawful state aid. The commission did not therefore err in its application of the notion of state aid and neither did it fail to provide sufficient justification for its decision.
The appeals procedure for Belgium and the three financial cooperative companies is suspended until the Court of Justice has answered the Belgian constitutional court's queries. (Original version in French by Elodie Lamer)