2.

Since there are two heads of claim in the complaint and the action (the right to the daily subsistence allowance and the right to reimbursement of removal expenses) it is necessary to consider the question of admissibility in relation to each head of claim separately. I shall commence, therefore, with the claim for the daily subsistence allowance. As you know, according to the second indent of the said Article 90 (2) of the Staff Regulations a complaint against an act affecting a specified person must be made within three months of the date of notification of the decision to the person concerned or the date on which he received such notification. To establish in the present case whether the complaint was submitted in time it is necessary to identify the act adversely affecting Mrs Geronimo and to ascertain when it was notified to her or when she received such notification. The parties are at issue on this matter. The applicant maintains that she was notified of the unfavourable decision only by the letter dated 27 November 1978 from the Director-General for Administration, Personnel and Finance in which the President of the Staff Committee was informed that the applicant had no right to the daily subsistence allowance or to the reimbursement of removal expenses. On the other hand the defendant institution maintains that in the first place the applicant was informed of the unfavourable decision in respect of the daily subsistence allowance by means of the explanatory note which accompanies the payment of the monthly salary (pay slip) and this was first sent to Mrs Geronimo after her establishment in January 1978. In the second place the defendant states that the form drawn up by the administration for each official on taking up employment also contains particulars of the allowances contained in the salary; the applicant was aware of that form at least from February 1978 for she refers to that date in her letter sent on 21 February 1978 to the Head of the Management and Staff Regulations Department. Finally, the defendant observes, further in the alternative, that the applicant was clearly informed of the refusal by means of the letter sent to her on 11 October 1978 by the Head of the Management and Staff Regulations Department. These three contentions in the submissions of the European Parliament deserve to be considered in the order in which they have been put forward. As regards the first it seems proper to recall that according to the case-law of this Court the monthly salary statement may constitute an act adversely affecting an official where the salary statement clearly shows the decision taken concerning that part of the remuneration which is the subject of the dispute (see the Judgment of 21 February 1974 in Joined Cases 15 to 33, 52, 53, 57 to 109, 116, 117, 123, 132 and 135 to 137/73 Schots née Korttier ν Contici/, Commission and Parliament [1974] ECR 177). The salary statement which was given to the members of staff of the Parliament (including, presumably, Mrs Geronimo) in the period with which we are concerned, that is the year 1978, was a statement having on its face particulars to identify the official (items 1 to 5) and the various components of the salary with the amounts relating thereto (items 6 to 19). The necessary explanations were printed on the back to enable the reader to understand the significance of each item. The various items of remuneration referred to in the statement were in fact of a permanent nature such as the salary, household allowance, dependent child allowance, flat-rate education allowance, expatriation allowance and so forth and thus they did not include the daily subsistence allowance which is of a temporary nature, but in cases in which the latter was due a separate, specific slip containing particulars of the allowance (the amount and period for which it was payable) was included with the salary statement. All this information has been supplied to the Court by the agent of the European Parliament by letter dated 25 March 1980 to which copies of the documents in question were annexed. Having regard to that I think that the fact that Mrs Geronimo was given the salary statement without the separate slip relating to the daily subsistence allowance was sufficient to make her aware that the latter allowance was not being granted to her and thus to put her in a position to make a complaint if she thought she should. This point of view is based on the fact that the salary statement contained particulars of all the items making up the salary and showed the amounts whose sum, after deducting tax and insurance which were also shown, logically had to correspond to the total salary; thus the absence of the daily subsistence allowance could mean only that the administration had decided not to grant that allowance. Further, the fact that the offer of employment made by the Administration by letter dated 9 December 1977 and signed by the Director-General for Administration, Personnel and Finance also mentioned the daily subsistence allowance (for a period of up to 180 days) among the items of remuneration which the applicant would receive should have induced her to check carefully the items of remuneration against the salary Statement to determine whether that salary contained all the items mentioned in the offer including the daily subsistence allowance. If this argument is accepted the head of claim relating to the daily subsistence allowance is certainly inadmissible since the complaint to the administration dated 20 February 1979 is more than a year after the act adversely affecting the applicant which goes back to January 1978.