Keywords

Summary



Keywords

1 Actions for annulment - Natural or legal persons - Measures of direct and individual concern to them - Commission decision addressed to a Member State ruling that State aid is incompatible with the common market - Decision appearing to potential beneficiaries of the aid to be a measure of general application - Participation in the procedure as interested third parties for the purposes of Article 93(2) of the Treaty - Inadmissible

(EC Treaty, Arts 93(2) and 173, fourth para.)

2 Actions for annulment - Natural or legal persons - Measures of direct and individual concern to them - Commission decision addressed to a Member State ruling that State aid is incompatible with the common market - Action brought by an association - Inadmissible

(EC Treaty, Arts 93(2) and 173, fourth para.)

Summary

1 Persons other than those to whom a decision is addressed may claim to be individually concerned within the meaning of the fourth paragraph of Article 173 of the Treaty only if the decision affects them by reason of certain attributes peculiar to them or by reason of factual circumstances in which they are distinguished from all other persons, and by virtue of those factors distinguishes them individually in the same way as the person addressed.

Although addressed to a Member State, a Commission decision finding that the extension of tax provisions establishing special depreciation treatment for national airline companies constitutes aid incompatible with the common market appears, vis-à-vis the potential beneficiaries of those provisions, to be a measure of general application covering situations which are determined objectively and entailing legal effects for a class of persons envisaged in a general and abstract manner.

Consequently, an undertaking affected by that decision in the same way as any other operator who is, or might in the future be, in the same situation cannot claim that the advantage of which that decision deprives it is individual in nature.

Furthermore, a natural or legal person may be individually concerned by reason of its status as an interested third party for the purposes of Article 93(2) of the Treaty only by a Commission decision refusing to open the examination stage provided for by that provision. In such a case, it can ensure that its procedural guarantees under that provision are complied with only if it is entitled to challenge that decision before the Community judicature. Where, however, the Commission adopted its decision at the end of the examination stage, interested third parties will in fact have availed themselves of those procedural guarantees, with the result that they can no longer be regarded, by virtue of that status alone, as being individually concerned by the decision adopted at the end of the examination stage.

In State-aid matters, participation by an undertaking in the procedure under Article 93(2) does not suffice to distinguish it individually as it would the person to whom the contested decision is addressed. Such participation is only one of the factors capable of establishing that a natural or legal person is individually concerned by the decision which it seeks to have annulled.

2 An association formed to further the collective interests of a category of persons cannot be considered to be individually concerned for the purposes of the fourth paragraph of Article 173 of the Treaty by a measure affecting the general interests of that category and, in the absence of special circumstances such as the role which it could have played in the procedure leading to the adoption of the measure in question, such an association is not entitled to bring an action for annulment where its members may not do so individually.

In this connection, within the framework of a procedure leading to the adoption of a decision finding that State aid is incompatible with the common market, the intervention by such an association with the Commission for the purpose of defending the collective interests of its members cannot establish that the association in question has specific locus standi in its own right to bring an action against that decision.