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The facts giving rise to the dispute were set out by the General Court in paragraphs 1 to 27 of the judgment under appeal, as follows: ‘1 The applicants, Alcogroup and its subsidiary Alcodis, are active in the production, processing and marketing of ethanol used as an additive in the production of fossil fuels and as a fuel as such, on the one hand, and as a traditional ingredient in, for example, the production of beverages and the manufacture of pharmaceutical, chemical and cosmetic products, on the other. First investigation and first inspection 2 Following a complaint lodged in March 2013, the European Commission carried out inspections, in May 2013, on the premises of Platts (U.K.) Ltd and on the premises of undertakings active in the crude oil, refined petroleum products and biofuel sectors. Platts (U.K.) is an undertaking which has developed and offers the public a method for the assessment of ethanol prices called “market-on-close”. Those inspections were carried out in the context of a Commission investigation into both how that method works and possible collusion between undertakings regarding its manipulation (“the first investigation”). The case was registered at the Commission as AT.40054 – Oil and Biofuel Markets (formerly OCTOPUS). 3 In that context, the Commission adopted a decision dated 29 September 2014 ordering Alcogroup and all the undertakings controlled by it directly or indirectly, including Alcodis, to submit to an inspection under Article 20(4) of [Regulation No 1/2003]. The inspection took place on the applicants’ shared premises from 7 to 10 October 2014. Fifteen officials were authorised by the Commission to carry out that inspection, accompanied by representatives of the Belgian competition authority, and the applicants sought the assistance of their lawyers. 4 Following the first inspection, a large number of documents and emails were drafted and exchanged between the applicants and their lawyers with a view to their defence. According to the applicants, in order to indicate clearly that those documents and emails were covered by professional secrecy, each item of correspondence was, as a rule, labelled “legally privileged” in the title or placed in a file entitled “legally privileged”. The second investigation and the second inspection 5 In parallel with the first investigation, the Commission opened the AT.40244 – Bioethanol (formerly AQUAVIT) investigation concerning potential agreements and potential concerted practices aimed at coordinating the behaviour of undertakings active in the bioethanol marketing sector in the European Economic Area (EEA), the sharing of markets and customers, and the exchange of information (“the second investigation”). 6 In the context of the second investigation, the Commission adopted the [second inspection decision]. 7 On 16 March 2015, the Commission authorised eight officials to carry out the second inspection on the applicants’ premises. Of those officials, only one had been in the group of inspectors authorised to carry out the first inspection. In addition, two agents from the Belgian competition authority who had attended the first inspection also participated in the second. Finally, P.B. and L.B. (together, “the applicants’ lawyers”) attended the second inspection. 8 The second inspection took place over the course of four days, from Tuesday, 24 March to Friday, 27 March 2015. First day of the second inspection (24 March 2015) 9 The applicants’ lawyers, from the first day of the second inspection, made a request in principle to the Commission that the confidentiality of the defence documents drawn up subsequent to the first inspection be respected. 10 The parties disagree as to the measures requested by the applicants and accepted, in principle, by the Commission to guarantee such confidentiality and as to the actual conduct on the first day of that inspection. 11 In any case, it is not disputed that the Commission investigators carried out IT searches in order to identify documents of potential interest for the purposes of the second investigation. They examined the servers, hard drives and electronic devices of certain individuals with important roles at the applicants’ firms. Before examining documents individually, the investigators copied the documents identified to the Commission’s computers on the premises using digital investigation software called “Nuix” which allows indexing and searching by specific key words. Second day of the second inspection (25 March 2015) 12 On 25 March 2015, the investigators began the individual analysis of the documents copied to the Commission’s computers. 13 At the end of that day, the Commission saved to a USB key a list of 59 series of documents “to be exported”. 14 It transpired that five emails among the 59 series of documents were labelled as “legally privileged” in either their subject line or title. 15 Upon reading the list of the documents “to be exported” on the USB key, the applicants’ lawyers objected to the seizure of those emails and their attachments, which the Commission accepted. Consequently, those documents were not added to the Commission’s file. Third day of the second inspection (26 March 2015) 16 On the third day of the inspection, the Commission informed the applicants that, where a single document was labelled as “to be exported”, the Nuix software by default brought up all of the related documents, referred to as “the entire family tree”, and not only the individual item marked for export. That explains why the five emails that were “potentially protected” by legal professional privilege, described in paragraph 14 above, appeared in the list of the documents “to be exported”, giving the impression that all of the documents had been marked for export. 17 In addition, the investigators excluded the documents labelled as “legally privileged” from the data copied to the Commission’s computers and searched for using keywords. They placed them directly into a separate digital file for individual examination by an investigator in the presence of one of the applicants’ lawyers. In that way 22000 documents bearing the words “legally privileged” were separated out. During that individual check, the applicants’ lawyers were careful to hide the preview bar of the Nuix software. 18 The inspection report concerning the documents claimed to be confidential indicates that one document was seized on 26 March 2015. The document in question was the agreement concluded between L., a company established by L.B., on the one hand, and Alcogroup, on the other. The Commission wished to verify whether L.B. had the status of an independent lawyer within the meaning of the case-law of the Court of Justice and the applicants argued that that agreement was itself protected by legal professional privilege. Fourth and final day of the second inspection (27 March 2015) 19 The method described in paragraph 17 above, which the Commission regarded as too cumbersome, was abandoned towards the end of the morning of the fourth day of inspection. 20 In the end the Commission was permitted a cursory examination of the documents marked as “legally privileged”, once the documents subsequent to 7 October 2014, the date on which the first inspection began, had been excluded. In the context of that adjustment, the Commission agreed not to examine, even summarily, a number of documents following explanations provided by the applicants’ lawyers. 21 In spite of the fact that the documents labelled as “legally privileged” had been removed from the list of documents to be examined, the applicants discovered a document they regarded as legally privileged among the list of documents “to be exported” drawn up by the investigators on 27 March 2015. 22 Following the applicants’ objection to the seizure of that document, the investigators agreed to delete it from the list of documents “to be exported”. Developments following the second inspection 23 By letter dated 16 April 2015, the Commission returned the agreement between L., established by L.B., and Alcogroup, in its sealed envelope, stating that the document was not relevant for the purposes of the investigation. 24 By letter of 21 April 2015 addressed to the Commission, the applicants claimed that the fact that a large number of documents which had been drawn up for their defence in the context of the first inspection had been examined in the context of the second inspection amounted to an infringement of the right to due process, the fundamental right to the inviolability of private premises and the principles of proper administration and the protection of legitimate expectations. Both the first and second investigations were vitiated by those infringements, such that the Commission ought to have confirmed “the immediate suspension of any investigative or other measures taken by the Commission’s staff in respect of [them] … in the context of the AT.40244 (AQUAVIT) and AT.40054 (OCTOPUS) proceedings”. 25 In its [letter] of 8 May 2015, the Commission rejected the request to suspend all measures of investigation in respect of the applicants in the two sets of proceedings concerned … By letter of 8 May 2015, the Commission disputed that there had been any infringement of the applicants’ rights in either of the two sets of proceedings, stating, in particular, that the fact that the documents had been marked did not necessarily amount to an examination of those documents and that the applicants’ claims that the team of inspectors had deliberately selected and analysed documents covered by professional secrecy were utterly unfounded. According to the Commission, there was therefore no reason to suspend the two ongoing investigations. 26 … 27 The second investigation which gave rise to the second inspection was closed on 7 April 2017.’