The European Commission announced on Wednesday 20 February that it would now use the number of seats allocated to a Member State in the European Parliament, and no longer the number of votes of a Member State in the Council of the EU, as a parameter to assess a State's institutional weight in calculating the amounts of lump sums and daily penalty payments it proposes to the EU Court of Justice to impose on a State that has infringed EU law.
To calculate the amount of these lump sums and daily penalty payments, the Commission takes into account four parameters: (1) the gravity and (2) the duration of the infringement found, (3) the economic weight and (4) the institutional weight of the country concerned.
The "technical" change concerns the parameter of institutional weight, since the Court asked us in November 2018 (judgment C-93/17) not to use the weighting of Member States' votes in the Council, Alexander Winterstein, on behalf of the Commission, said.
According to Mr Winterstein, the system adopted has the merit of being "anchored in the Treaties", even if the spread between the amounts set for the smallest countries and those for the largest Member States is greater with the distribution of seats in the European Parliament than with the weighting of votes in the Council. But if it had abandoned the parameter of the country's institutional weight, the European institution estimates that the gap between the amounts for small and large countries would have increased sixfold, while the new system would reduce the amounts for all Member States.
Finally, the following standard lump sums were set: -3,105 euros for daily penalty payments; -1,035 euros for lump sums. These figures will be recalculated after Brexit.
The Court imposed lump sums and/or daily penalty payments on a Member State in 32 cases involving mainly infringements of environmental and State aid law. Greece was targeted in 10 cases, Italy in 5 cases, Spain in 4 cases, France and Portugal in 3 cases each.
See the Commission's Communication (http://bit.ly/2BEoDvV ) and its Annex (http://bit.ly/2XeumBK ). (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)