Luxembourg, 16/02/2001 (Agence Europe) - In a case concerning State aid to the Siemens company, the Court of Justice presided over by Claus Gulmann recalled its case law according to which the Commission only had two months to carry out a preliminary checks into the State aid paid to the Siemens company in Villach. Austria has just won its case against the European Commission. Vienna believing that the Commission was duly informed of the planned State aid in favour of Siemens as of the reception of the information that had been provided to it on 10 September 1997 and that after a period of two months, the aids could be paid. The Court adds that a planned aid becomes an existing aid if the Commission does not initiate a contradiction procedure within the two months following the complete notification of the aid. And this in order to avoid "legal insecurity contrary to the finality of the pre-assessment phase of State aid", explains the Court. These aids to research and development for ATS 371 million out of a total of 4,500 million had been granted by the Federal authorities as well as by the Land of Corinthian and the Commune of Villach.
Moreover:
France transposed the 1995 Directive on safety standards applicable to lifts on 24 August 2000, when it should have applied these standards at the latest in 1 July 1997. This delay means it is condemned by the second chamber of the EU Court of Justice. Paris spoke of difficulties of an internal nature that made this transposition difficult.
For an issue of procedure, the European Commission lost its case against France to which it reproaches not having foreseen to recognise the manufacturing standards and the tests and checks enforced in the other Member States on rubber materials and objects in contact with foodstuffs and drinks. Paris feels that the Commission had made an amalgam between the two cases, for which the sixth chamber supported it.
The second chamber annuls the European Commission decision from 1998 rejecting the complaint made by the National Association of Licensed Opencast Operators (NALOO) association of licensed open sky coal producers represented by Mark Cran QC and Mark Hoskins, Barrister. NALOO reproached British Coal Corporation (former National Coal Board), owner of nearly all the coal reserves in the United Kingdom, for its excessive fees for abusive extraction. For the Court "the 1998 decision could not legally reject the NALOO complaint without outlining, for the least part, the reasons likely to allow for the distancing of the abusive character of the fees taken during the 1986/1987 and 1989/1990 financial years". A ruling that is part of the long legal battle lead by NALOO in view of gaining compensation in the United Kingdom.
Nachi Europe, subsidiary of the Japanese company Nachi Fujikoshi, will not gain a reimbursement for the anti-dumping duty on ball bearings from Japan. The Court of Justice felt that neither the NTN/Seiko ruling by the Court of First Instance nor its own Seiko ruling had the effect of "changing" the validity of the anti-dumping regulation on the basis of which a duty had been applied to ball bearings. Nachi Europe had requested to be reimbursed because, it said, the 1992 anti-dumping regulation had been made illegal by the two rulings of the European jurisdictions. The Court supported the decision by German customs to refuse. Nachi being represented by Mrs N Polley and Mr A Scheffler.
As for the EU Court of First Instance it ruled in the Compana Internacional de Pasca y Derivados (Inpensca) case. The Spanish ship owner lost its case against the Commission, against whom its lawyers Mrs Maria and Mr Begona Angulo Fuertes reproach it for having refused a financing for the construction of a Tuna freezer ship "Txori-Berri". The company "did not establish new and substantial facts that would have brought the Commission to carry out a re-assessment of its 8 December 1991 decision definitively rejecting the requests for financial support that it had presented in 1989", indicated the Court's second chamber.