In a judgment handed down on Thursday, 26 June, the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld judgments made by the EU’s General Court in May 2023 that approved the European Commission’s February 2019 decision (see EUROPE 12202/17) to authorise the acquisition of certain nuclear and renewable electricity generation assets owned by the German energy company E.ON by RWE, a fellow energy company.
Nine German municipal utilities appealed the General Court’s May 2023 rulings.
The Court of Justice dismissed five of the nine appeals (cases C-464/23 P, C-465/23 P, C-467/23 P, C-468/23 P, and C-470/23 P)—confirming, like the General Court, that the disputed transaction did not constitute a ‘single concentration’ and that the European Commission had not committed any manifest errors in its assessment of whether the disputed transaction was compatible with competition law.
As regards the other four appeals (C-466/23 P, C-469/23 P, C-484/23 P, and C-485/23 P), the Court of Justice initially set aside the judgments made by the General Court in May 2023 by which the latter had dismissed the appeals as inadmissible. Nevertheless, giving its final ruling on these disputes, [the Court of Justice] found that the four German municipal utilities concerned failed to establish that their market position was substantially affected by the transaction in question.
However, the appeals brought against the judgments made by the General Court in December 2023 (see EUROPE 13318/26) pertaining to the European Commission’s approval of E.ON’s acquisition of Innogy’s energy distribution and retail business as well as certain generation assets are still pending before the Court of Justice.
See the Court of Justice’s judgments: https://aeur.eu/f/hle (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)