Poseidon Chartering BV v Marianne Zeeschip VOF and Others.
Date: 2006-03-16
14. It should be noted as a preliminary point in that connection that, within the framework of the cooperation between the Court and national courts and tribunals established by Article 234 EC, it is solely for the national court to determine, in the light of the particular circumstances of the case, both the need for a preliminary ruling in order to enable it to deliver judgment and the relevance of the questions which it submits to the Court. The Court can refuse a request submitted by a national court only where it is quite obvious that the ruling sought by that court on the interpretation of Community law bears no relation to the actual facts of the main action or its purpose or where the problem is general or hypothetical (see, inter alia, Case C-415/93 Bosman and Others  [1995] ECR I-4921, paragraphs 59 to 61; Case C-369/95 Somalfruit and Camar  [1997] ECR I-6619, paragraphs 40 and 41; Case C-36/99 Idéal tourisme  [2000] ECR I-6049, paragraph 20; Case C-306/99 BIAO  [2003] ECR I-1, paragraph 88; and Case C-17/03 VEMW and Others  [2005] ECR I-4983, paragraph 34).
15.  Consequently, where questions submitted by national courts concern the interpretation of a provision of Community law, the Court is, in principle, obliged to give a ruling. Neither the wording of Article 234 EC nor the aim of the procedure established by that article indicates that the framers of the Treaty intended to exclude from the jurisdiction of the Court requests for a preliminary ruling on a Community provision where the domestic law of a Member State refers to that Community provision in order to determine the rules applicable to a situation which is purely internal to that State (Case C-130/95 Giloy  [1997] ECR I-4291, paragraph 21, and Case C-1/99 Kofisa Italia  [2001] ECR I-207, paragraph 21).
16. Where domestic legislation adopts the same solutions as those adopted in Community law in order, in particular, to avoid discrimination against foreign nationals or any distortion of competition, it is clearly in the Community interest that, in order to forestall future differences of interpretation, provisions or concepts taken from Community law should be interpreted uniformly, irrespective of the circumstances in which they are to apply (see Case C-28/95 Leur-Bloem  [1997] ECR I-4161, paragraph 32; Giloy , paragraph 28; and Kofisa Italia , paragraph 32).
17. In the present case, although the questions concern a contract concluded with an intermediary with authority to negotiate a contract for services and not a contract for the sale or purchase of goods and the Directive does not therefore directly govern the situation in issue, the fact remains that, in implementing the provisions of the Directive in national law, the national legislature decided to treat those two situations in the same way.
18. Furthermore, there is nothing in the file to indicate that the national court is empowered to depart from the interpretation of the provisions of the Directive that the Court shall give.
19. In those circumstances, and as Advocate General Geelhoed proposed in points 13 to 16 of his Opinion, the Court should reply to the questions referred.
The questions referred for a preliminary ruling
25. The number of transactions concluded by the intermediary for and on behalf of the principal is normally an indicator of that continuing authority. As the referring court has pointed out, Article 17(2)(a) of the Directive uses the term ‘customers’ in the plural. However, as Advocate General Geelhoed stressed in point 24 of his Opinion, the number of transactions is not the sole determining factor in assessing whether the principal conferred continuing authority on the intermediary.