Brussels, 29/10/2003 (Agence Europe) - According to the European Commission's latest scoreboard on State aid, over half of the Member States have, in the last ten years, refrained from granting aid for the rescue or restructuring of companies (measures recognised as most likely to bring about competition distortion, because they do not encourage companies to compete with others which do not have recourse to this type of support). Referring to "recent cases" (Alstom and Bull: Ed), Commissioner Monti said the strictest rules would be applied to aid granted to companies in financial difficulties, "whilst ensuring that the necessary means are available for the training and reemployment of the workers concerned".
The scoreboard indicates that in the period 1990-2002, the Commission authorised rescue and restructuring aid to some 120 struggling companies. Some 35 of these companies were in Germany (the figures still do not include the companies which received aid under restructuring for the new Länder in the 1990s), 20 in France, 15 in Spain and Italy, and between 5 and 10 in Austria, Belgium and Portugal. The largest Member States such as France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, which are also the States with the highest GDP, had greater recourse to this type of aid, said spokesperson Tilman Lueder. In the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Ireland, this kind of aid was granted twice at most, or not at all. In the EU as a whole, the Commission states that there has been a general effort to reduce the overall level of aid, and redirect it to cross-cutting objectives. The most notable innovation was recorded in Denmark, where the total amount of aid to companies was cut by 10% in 2003. Several Member States also indicated that they are more likely to use general economic measures than aid regimes.
Some of them, however, continue to grant individual ad hoc grants and sectorial aid, which are particularly likely to distort competition. (The scoreboard can be consulted at http: //europa.eu.int/comm/competition/state_aids/scoreboard. It will next be updated in Spring 2004.