Opinion of the Advocate General — ECLI:EU:C:2015:694
Date: 2015-10-15
Language of the case: German
Subject matter: Competition;Agreements, decisions and concerted practices
Procedure: Action for annulment;Appeal - successful
Origin: Germany

Summary — Judgment of the Court (Third Chamber), 10 March 2016 1. Appeal — Grounds — Inadequate or contradictory statement of reasons — Admissibility (Art. 256 TFEU; Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 58, first para.) 2. Acts of the institutions — Statement of reasons — Obligation — Scope — Assessment of the duty to state reasons by reference to the circumstances of the case — No need to specify all the relevant factual and legal elements (Art. 296 TFEU) 3. Competition — Administrative procedure — Request for information — Obligation to state reasons — Scope (Art. 296, second para., TFEU; Council Regulation No 1/2003, Art. 18(3)) 1. See the text of the decision. (see para. 15) 2. See the text of the decision. (see para. 16) 3. As regards the statement of reasons for a decision requesting information under Article 18(3) of Regulation No 1/2003, that provision defines the essential elements thereof. That obligation to state specific reasons constitutes a fundamental requirement designed not merely to show that the request for information is justified but also to enable the undertakings concerned to assess the scope of their duty to cooperate whilst at the same time safeguarding their rights of defence. With respect to the obligation to state the ‘purpose of the request’, this relates to the Commission’s obligation to indicate the subject of its investigation in its request, and therefore to identify the alleged infringement of competition rules. In that regard, the Commission is not required to communicate to the addressee of a decision requesting information all the information at its disposal concerning the presumed infringements, or to make a precise legal analysis of those infringements, providing it clearly indicates the suspicions which it intends to investigate. Since the necessity of the information must be judged in relation to the purpose stated in the request for information, that purpose must be indicated with sufficient precision, otherwise it will be impossible to determine whether the information is necessary and the Court will be prevented from exercising judicial review. In that regard, it is true that a request for information is an investigative measure that is generally used as part of the investigation phase preceding the notification of the statement of objections and that the sole purpose of the preliminary investigation procedure is to enable the Commission to obtain the information and documentation necessary to check the actual existence and scope of a specific factual and legal situation. Furthermore, although the Court has held, with respect to inspection decisions, that, even though the Commission is obliged to indicate as precisely as possible what is being sought and the matters to which the investigation must relate, it is, on the other hand, not essential, in a decision ordering an inspection, to define precisely the relevant market, to set out the exact legal nature of the presumed infringements or to indicate the period during which those infringements were allegedly committed, the Court justified that finding by the fact that inspections take place at the beginning of an investigation, at a time when precise information is not yet available to the Commission. However, an excessively succinct, vague and generic — and in some respects, ambiguous — statement of reasons does not fulfil the requirements of the obligation to state reasons laid down in Article 18(3) of Regulation No 1/2003 in order to justify a request for information where such a request is made more than two years after the first inspections, and even though the Commission had already sent a number of requests for information to undertakings suspected of involvement in an infringement and several months after the decision to initiate proceedings. (see paras 17, 19-21, 24, 37-39)