Judgment — ECLI:EU:T:1999:139
Date: 1999-07-08
Language of the case: Italian
Court formation: First Chamber
Based on: Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (1957)
Subject matter: Agriculture and Fisheries;Sugar
Concepts: Applications by natural or legal persons
Procedure: Action for annulment - inadmissible
Origin: Italy

Summary of the Judgment
Actions for annulment — Natural or legal persons — Measures of direct and individual
concern to them — Frovision fixing the amount of compensation for sugar storage costs in
respect of a particular marketing year — Action brought by Italian sugar manufactur­
ers— Inadmissible
(EC Treaty, Art. 173, fourth para, (now, after amendment, Art. 230, fourth para., EC);
Council Regulation No 1534/95, Art. 4)
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SUMMARY— CASE T-158/95
The action brought by Italian sugar man­
ufacturers for annulment of Article 4 of
Regulation No 1534/95 —which fixes the
amount of compensation for sugar storage
costs in respect of the 1995/96 marketing
year — is inadmissible
Article 4 must be regarded as a measure of
general application, applying to objectively
determined situations and addressed in
general terms to categories of persons
regarded in the abstract, in so far as it
provides for flat-rate reimbursement and
applies to an indefinite number of storage
operations in the Community carried out
by all Community sugar manufacturers.
Even supposing that the Council was aware
of the applicants' identity — that is to say,
as holders of sugar production quotas —
when it adopted the Regulation, that fact is
not sufficient to enable them to be regarded
as individually concerned. The general
application of a measure is not called in
question by the fact that it is possible to
define more or less recisely the number or
even the identity of the persons to whom it
applies at any given time, as long as it is
established that such application takes
effect by virtue of an objective situation
of fact or of law defined by the measure in
question. Moreover, the fact that a measure
may have different specific effects on the
various persons to whom it applies is not
inconsistent with its nature as a regulation
when that situation is objectively defined.
Furthermore, the mere fact that the appli­
cants hold production quotas is not suffi­
cient to establish that their specific rights
were adversely affected. The allocation of
production quotas was not, prior to the
adoption of the contested Regulation,
accompanied by an established right that
reimbursement would be fixed at an
amount which took account of the storage
costs which in practice only the Italian
sugar producers were required to bear. The
producers' legal situation was therefore no
different from that of other holders of
production quotas, all of whom had to
adjust to the amount of the uniform flat-
rate reimbursement fixed by the Council
for each marketing year.
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