2.

The applicant submits in support of the application that renting storage space in Brussels for her furniture was a “logical consequence” of her secondment to Yaoundé. Once she had moved there remained no reasonable grounds for her to retain the flat in the place of her official employment, especially as both before and after that she had a residence where she came from in southern France, which was also considered to be her centre of interest. Since she was not permitted to take her furniture with her to Cameroon the only possible course of action for her was to put it into store. The costs of storage must therefore be considered as expenses entailed by her secondment which are to be reimbursed under the terms of Article 38 (d) of the Staff Regulations. The Commission's contention is that those costs are not a direct consequence of the secondment, nor may they be regarded as additional expenses within the meaning of the provision in question. Even if that view were not accepted the costs must be considered to have been compensated for by the allowances paid to the applicant for service overseas and expatriation and the installation and resettlement allowances which total altogether BFR 266307. To come directly to the conclusion: the Commission's principal argument is the one which, in my view, must be accepted. Even without going into the question whether the applicant has any claim against the Commission under Article 38 in view of the terms of her contract described above, the wording of Article 38 is sufficiently unambiguous to show that the only expenses to be reimbursed are additional expenses entailed by the official's secondment. There can be no question of additional expenses, however, unless the costs in question did not have to be paid by the official before the secondment. Whether that condition has been met may therefore be determined only an objective comparison of the applicant's financial situation before her secondment with her situation while she was on secondment. As the applicant rightly pointed out, however, that does not mean that the separate components of the total amounts may be aggregated and a comparison then made; the correct procedure is to consider for the purposes of comparison only those elements of the remuneration which have a similar purpose. When that comparison is made it will be seen that the applicant's claims under the Staff Regulations are covered by her entitlements in the way of basic salary, household and child allowances under her contract with the European Association for Cooperation. In addition to those the applicant was entitled under her contract to receive from the European Association for Cooperation an overseas service allowance, an expatriation allowance payable in local currency and free furnished accommodation where even the electricity was paid for. By contrast to that the Staff Regulations do not provide for any particular compensation to be given for the costs of the residence which Article 20 of the Staff Regulations requires officials to have at their place of employment. Hence, if the applicant has relinquished her accommodation in Brussels, on wholly reasonable financial grounds, in order to put into storage the furniture which she was not able to take with her to Cameroon, thereby reducing her costs, it cannot be said that she has incurred additional living expenses. The fact that at the same time she was provided with free furnished accommodation at her new place of employment must carry special weight. Thus by giving up her residence she ultimately achieved a saving corresponding to the difference between the rent of the flat and the storage costs. The provision in question is not intended, however, as its wording shows, to improve the financial situation of the official on secondment by comparison with his previous position. It is merely designed to prevent his financial position from deteriorating as a result of his secondment. Lastly the abovementioned advantage is not rendered nugatory, as the applicant believes, by the withdrawal of the expatriation allowance. Apart from the fact that it was not quite apparent in the course of the oral proceedings whether the applicant, who is of French nationality, drew such an allowance up to the date of her secondment, all that need be said here is that the purpose of the expatriation allowance, as was made clear by the Court of Justice in Case 21/74 (judgment of 20 February 1975, Jeanne Airola v Commission [1975] ECR 221) and Case 147/79 (judgment of 16 October 1980, René Hochstrass v Court of Justice of the European Communities [1980] ECR 3005), is to compensate for the extra expense and inconvenience of taking up employment with the Communities when the official in question, who does not have the nationality of the country in which he is employed, is thereby obliged to change his residence. That being the purpose of the expatriation allowance, which is not to be confused with a residence allowance, the conclusion must be that there ceased to be any grounds for granting such an allowance once the applicant had relinquished her residence in the place of her official employment and after the extra expense, of being employed overseas for example, had been compensated for by a number of other special allowances, the total of which was in any case greater than the expatriation allowance. It follows too from what I have said, to take another line of argument, that the applicant is not entitled to what she claims because the furniture storage costs were not occasioned by her secondment but were merely a consequence thereof. The sense and purpose of the provision cannot be to compensate for all expenses which may arise even in a remote connection with a secondment; on the contrary, in order to set a limit to the sphere of application of the provision, there must be a requirement that the expenses represent a necessary consequence in the interests of the service of secondment. Those conditions are not met, however, by expenditure incurred for the sole purpose of enabling the applicant to make greater savings.