Greece failed to fulfil obligations to recover unlawful aid paid to Greek farmers as compensation for adverse weather conditions, according to an EU Court of Justice judgment on Wednesday 12 May (case C-11/20).
In 2009, the Greek Agricultural Insurance Organization (ELGA) paid Greek farmers a total of €425 million in compensation for damage caused by adverse weather conditions in 2008. On 7 December 2011, the Commission classified these measures as unlawful State Aid incompatible with the internal market. Accordingly, it ordered the Greek authorities to recover them from the beneficiaries. Greece lodged several appeals, and the Court confirmed in 2014 that the Greek State must recover the aid.
The Commission has brought an action for failure to fulfil obligations before the Court.
The Court, in upholding this action for failure to fulfil obligations, finds that Greece had not taken, on the expiry of the period prescribed by the Commission (11 June 2012), all the necessary measures to recover the unlawful State Aid from the beneficiaries. Indeed, more than eight years after adopting the Commission’s decision, the Greek authorities have still not implemented it.
The Court notes that it was not absolutely impossible for Greece to recover the aid. According to the Court, the administrative or technical difficulties associated with a large number of beneficiaries do not make it technically impossible to achieve recovery.
The Court also considers that Greece has failed to sufficiently inform the Commission of the measures taken to implement the decision.
As for the claim that the recovery of the aid would have caused social unrest, the Court found that the Greek authorities had not demonstrated “the reality of the risk of a reaction on the part of the farmers which would have consequences for public order which they would not be able to overcome”.
Link to the judgment (in French): https://bit.ly/3oahQ3X (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)