Peter Biegi Nahrungsmittel GmbH and Commonfood Handelsgesellschaft für Agrar-Produkte mbH v Commission of the European Communities.
Date: 2005-03-03
37. As regards the admissibility of this plea, it should be recalled, first, that according to settled case-law it follows from Article 225 EC, the first paragraph of Article 58 of the Statute of the Court of Justice and Article 112(1)(c) of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice that an appeal must indicate precisely the contested elements of the judgment which the appellant seeks to have set aside and also the legal arguments specifically advanced in support of the appeal (see, inter alia, Case C‑41/00 P Interporc  v Commission  [2003] ECR I‑2125, paragraph 15, and Case C‑496/99 P Commission  v CAS Succhi di Frutta  [2004] ECR I‑0000, paragraph 48).
38. An appeal which merely repeats or reproduces verbatim the pleas in law and arguments previously submitted to the Court of First Instance, including those based on facts expressly rejected by that Court, does not satisfy the requirements to state reasons under those provisions (see, inter alia, Interporc  v Commission , paragraph 16, and Commission  v CAS Succhi di Frutta , paragraph 49).
39. However, provided that the appellant challenges the interpretation or application of Community law by the Court of First Instance, the points of law examined at first instance may be discussed again in the course of an appeal. Indeed, if an appellant could not thus base his appeal on pleas in law and arguments already relied on before the Court of First Instance, an appeal would be deprived of part of its purpose (see, inter alia, Interporc  v Commission , paragraph 17, and Commission  v CAS Succhi di Frutta , paragraph 50).
40. It should be recalled, second, that it follows from Article 225 EC and Article 58 of the Statute of the Court of Justice that an appeal is limited to points of law. According to settled case-law, the Court of First Instance therefore has exclusive jurisdiction to find the facts, save where a substantive inaccuracy in its findings is attributable to the documents submitted to it, and to appraise those facts. That appraisal thus does not, save where the clear sense of the evidence has been distorted, constitute a point of law which is subject, as such, to review by the Court of Justice in an appeal (see, inter alia, Case C‑136/92 P Commission  v Brazzelli Lualdi and Others  [1994] ECR I‑1981, paragraphs 47 to 49, and Case C‑470/00 P Parliament  v Ripa di Meana and Others  [2004] ECR I‑0000, paragraph 40).
41. However, it is settled law that, where the Court of First Instance has found or appraised the facts, the Court of Justice has jurisdiction, pursuant to Article 225 EC, to carry out a review of the legal classification of those facts and the legal inferences drawn from them by the Court of First Instance. As the Court of Justice has held on several occasions, such a classification is a question of law which, as such, may be subject to review by the Court of Justice in an appeal (see, inter alia, Case C‑19/93 P Rendo and Others  v Commission  [1995] ECR I‑3319, paragraph 26, and Parliament  v Ripa di Meana and Others , paragraph 41).
42. In the present case, Biegi and Commonfood submit that the Court of First Instance infringed Community law by holding that the errors on the part of the German customs authorities were detectable by the appellants. More particularly, they criticise the Court for having thereby exaggerated, in the implementation of Article 220(2)(b) of the CCC, as interpreted by the Court of Justice, the requirements of care of the economic operators concerned, and for having wrongly assessed the complexity of the customs rules in question.
43. In those circumstances, the appellants contest the Court of First Instance’s answer to a question of the legal classification of the facts, and thus submit a question of law to review by the Court of Justice.
46. Under Article 220(2)(b) of the CCC, the competent authorities are not to make subsequent entry in the accounts of import duties if three cumulative conditions are satisfied. First, the failure to collect the duties must have been due to an error by the competent authorities themselves; next, their error must be of such a kind that it could not reasonably have been detected by a person liable for payment acting in good faith; and, finally, that person must have complied with all the provisions laid down by the legislation in force as regards his customs declaration (see, by analogy, Case 161/88 Binder  [1989] ECR 2415, paragraphs 15 and 16; Joined Cases C‑153/94 and C‑204/94 Faroe Seafood and Others  [1996] ECR I‑2465, paragraph 83; order in Case C‑299/98 P CPL Imperial 2 and Unifrigo  v Commission  [1999] ECR I‑8683, paragraph 22; and order in Case C‑30/00 William Hinton & Sons  [2001] ECR I‑7511, paragraphs 68, 69, 71 and 72).
47. With respect to the second of those conditions, which is the only one at issue in the present appeal, it should be recalled that, according to settled case-law, whether an error of the competent customs authorities was detectable must be assessed having regard to the nature of the error, the professional experience of the operators concerned and the care which they exercised ( Faroe Seafood and Others , paragraph 99, and Ilumitrónica , paragraph 54).
48. As regards the nature of the error, it must be assessed in the light of the complexity or sufficient simplicity of the rules concerned (see Case C‑187/91 Belovo  [1992] ECR I‑4937, paragraph 18, and Faroe Seafood and Others , paragraph 100) and the period of time during which the authorities persisted in their error (see Case C‑38/95 Foods Import  [1996] ECR I‑6543, paragraph 30, and Ilumitrónica , paragraph 56).
54. From those considerations, it must be concluded that Regulation No 1359/95 in itself contained an ambiguity as to the actual scope of the points in it concerning the WTO tariff quotas, in particular in so far as it referred to goods coming under CN codes 0207 41 40, 0207 41 41 and 0207 41 71. In particular, the combination of the heading and the various remarks in column 6 of Annex 7 to that regulation created a situation which was not sufficiently simple for it to be easily detectable from an examination of them that, from 1 July 1995, use of the tariff quotas relating to those goods remained subject to the condition, laid down by Regulation No 1431/94, of producing an import licence. The rules applicable in the present case may thus objectively be described as complex (see, for example, Ilumitrónica , paragraph 57).