On Thursday 20 January, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) fined Greece €5.5 million and imposed a penalty payment of €4.37 million for every six months of delay in a case concerning the non-recovery of State aid illegally paid to the mining and metallurgy company Larco. The fine and penalty payments will be paid into the EU budget.
The conviction is the latest step in a case that began in March 2013 with the opening of a formal investigation by the European Commission into aid granted to the company Larco in 2008, 2010 and 2011. In March 2014, the Commission found that the aid was “unlawful and incompatible with the internal market” and thus had to be recovered.
The Commission found that Greece had not complied with its obligations and in 2016 brought an action for failure to fulfil obligations before the CJEU. The Court had then found, in a first judgment on 9 November 2017, that Greece had failed to fulfil its obligations to recover the aid.
Considering that Athens had still not solved the problem, the European Commission filed a second action for failure to fulfil obligations on 29 January 2020 and requested that a lump sum and a penalty payment be paid.
In February 2020, Greece had placed Larco under special administration due to financial difficulties and put in place procedures to recover the aid paid. As at May 2020, €160 million still remained unpaid.
In its judgment, the Court also points out that, in addition to the duration of the infringement, the decision to impose such a fine is also justified by the “repeated nature of the infringing conduct” of Greece in the area of state aid.
See the CJEU judgment: https://bit.ly/33SEnw2 (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)