Judgment — ECLI:EU:C:2015:353
Date: 2015-06-04
Language of the case: French
Court formation: Tenth Chamber
Subject matter: Taxation;Excise duties
Procedure: Reference for a preliminary ruling
Origin: France

Summary — Judgment of the Court (Tenth Chamber), 4 June 2015 1. Questions referred for a preliminary ruling — Jurisdiction of the Court — Need to reformulate the questions (Art. 267 TFEU) 2. Tax provisions — Harmonisation of laws — Excise duties — Directive 92/83 — Alcohol and alcoholic beverages — Application of a reduced rate of excise duty for certain goods — Beer brewed by small independent breweries — Scope — No operation under licence — Concept — Brewery producing its beer in accordance with an agreement authorising it to use the trade marks and the production process of a third party — Not included (Council Directive 92/83, Art. 4(2) 1. See the text of the decision. (see paras 14-17) 2. For the purpose of applying the reduced rate of excise duty on beer, the condition laid down in Article 4(2) of Directive 92/83 on the harmonisation of the structures of excise duties on alcohol and alcoholic beverages, according to which a brewery must not operate under licence, is not met if the brewery concerned makes its beer in accordance with an agreement pursuant to which it is authorised to use the trade marks and production process of a third party. Directive 92/83 seeks to prevent the benefits of a reduction of duty on beer from being granted to breweries, the size and capacity of which could cause distortions in the internal market. Consequently, Article 4(2) of Directive 92/83 requires that small breweries with an annual beer production of less than 200 000 hectolitres should be genuinely autonomous from any other brewery both as regards their legal and economic structure, and as regards their production structure, where they use physically separate premises and do not operate under licence. The requirement not to operate under licence is one of the requirements aiming to ensure that the small brewery concerned is genuinely independent from any other brewery. It follows that the notion of ‘operat[ing] under licence’ must be interpreted so as to include beer subject to any form of authorisation, from which it results, that that small brewery is not completely independent of the third party which has given it that authorisation. Such is the case as regards an authorisation to exploit a patent, a trade mark or a production process belonging to that third party. (see paras 21-23, 25, operative part)