Opinion of the Advocate General — ECLI:EU:C:2001:533
Date: 2001-10-11
Language of the case: Italian
Based on: Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (1957)
Subject matter: Economic, social and territorial cohesion;European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
Procedure: Action for annulment - successful
Origin: Italy

Summary of the Judgment 
1. Procedure — Intervention — Plea of inadmissibility not raised by the defendant — 
Not admissible 
(EC Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 37, fourth para.; Rides of Procedure, 
Art. 93(4)) 
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SUMMARY — CASE C-107/99 
2. Actions for annulment — Pleas in law — Infringement of essential procedural 
requirements — Lack of authentication of an act 
(EC Treaty, Art. 173 (now, after amendment, Art. 230 EC); Commission Rules of 
Procedure, Art. 16, first para.) 
1. Under the fourth paragraph of 
Article 37 of the EC Statute of the 
Court of Justice, submissions made in 
an application to intervene are limited 
to supporting the submissions of one of 
the parties. Moreover, under Article 93(4) 
of the Rules of Procedure, an intervener 
must accept the case as he finds it at the 
time of his intervention. 
It follows that an intervener has no 
standing to raise a plea of inadmis­
sibility and the Court is thus not bound 
to adjudicate on such a plea where the 
defendant in whose support it was 
granted leave to intervene, has raised 
no plea of inadmissibility. 
(see paras 27-29) 
2. It is the mere failure to authenticate an 
act which constitutes the infringement 
of an essential procedural requirement 
and it is not necessary also to establish 
that the act is vitiated by some other 
defect or that the lack of authentication 
resulted in harm to the person relying 
on it. Moreover, it is indispensable for 
authentication of the act to precede its 
notification because otherwise there 
would always be a risk that the notified 
text would not be identical to the text 
adopted by the Commission. 
(see para. 47) 
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