JUDGMENT OF THE COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE (Second Chamber)

25 September 2002

Joined Cases T-201/00 and T-384/00

Agnès Ajour and Others

v

Commission of the European Communities

‛Officials — Remuneration — Weighting for Ireland — Cost of living in Dublin — Articles 64 and 65 of the Staff Regulations’

Full text in French II-885

Application for:

annulment of the Commission's decisions drawing up the applicant's salary statements between September and December 1999 and the Commission's decisions drawing up, pursuant to Council Regulation (EC, ECSC, EURATOM) No 2700/1999 of 17 December 1999 adjusting with effect from 1 July 1999 the remuneration and pensions of officials and other servants of the European Communities and the weightings applied thereto (OJ 1999 L 327, p. 1), the statements of arrears of remuneration for the period from 15 May to 31 December 1999 and the applicant's salary statements drawn up since January 2000.

Held:

There is no need to rule in Case T-201/00 with regard to Mr Kienersberger and those entitled under him. The applications are dismissed. The parties are ordered to bear their own costs.

Summary

Officials — Remuneration — Weightings — Fixing — Discretion of the institutions — Judicial review — Limits

(Staff Regulations, Arts 64 and 65; Annex XI)

With regard to the establishment or adjustment of the weightings applicable to the remuneration of officials, Annex XI to the Staff Regulations entrusts Eurostat with the responsibility, in agreement with the statistical offices of the Member States, for calculating the economic parities and for checking that the relationships between weightings correctly establish the equivalence of purchasing power. In that regard, the wording of the provisions of Articles 64 and 65 of the Staff Regulations and of the aforementioned annex and the degree of complexity of the subject-matter mean that the institutions have a wide discretion as regards the factors and information to be taken into consideration when adjusting the remuneration of Community officials.

Consequently, the assessment to be made by the Community judicature with regard to the determination and selection of the basic data and statistical methods used by Eurostat to establish the proposed weightings must be confined to verifying that the principles laid down by the provisions of the Staff Regulations have been complied with, that there are no manifest errors in the assessment of the facts on the basis of which the weightings were fixed and that there has been no misuse of powers.

Moreover, the onus is on any person seeking to call in question the information and method used by the Commission in fixing the weightings to adduce evidence that a manifest error has been made. Furthermore, even where such evidence is adduced with regard to the actual cost of a given product or service, that cannot, in itself, render the weighting at issue unlawful. The impact of such an error on the overall parity and, therefore, on the calculation of the weighting would still have to be demonstrated.

(see paras 46-49)

See: T-544/93 and T-566/93 Abelio and Others v Commission [1995] ECRSC I-A-271 and II-815, paras 53, 55, 56 and 79; T-158/98 Bareyt and Others v Commission [2000] ECRSC I-A-235 and II-1085, paras 57 and 64