Bent Jensen and Korn- og Foderstofkompagniet A/S v Landbrugsministeriet - EF-Direktoratet.
Date: 1998-05-19
34 It must first be observed that, under the scheme for financing the common agricultural policy, the Community grants aid in the context of a division of powers with the Member States.  The sums corresponding to the aid are placed at the disposal of the Member States, which must ensure that they are properly managed (Case C-186/93 Unaprol v AIMA [1994] ECR I-3615, paragraph 27).
36 On the other hand, the Court has held, in the case of an insolvent trader to whom funds had been wrongly paid, that set-off may in fact constitute the only practicable way open to the authorities to recover such sums (Case 250/78 DEKA v EEC [1983] ECR 421, paragraph 14).
37 However, national rules would be incompatible with the Treaty and with the rules on the common organisation of markets if they authorised practices liable to interfere with the functioning of the machinery employed by those organisations in order to achieve their ends (see, to that effect, Joined Cases 36/80 and 71/80 Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association v Ireland [1981] ECR 735, paragraph 15, and Case 218/85 Cerafel v Le Campion [1986] ECR 3513, paragraph 13).
48 It is true that, in the specific context of the common agricultural policy, the Court has already made it clear that, in so far as Community law, including its general principles, does not include common rules on the point at issue, the national authorities, when implementing Community regulations, act in accordance with the procedural and substantive rules of their own national law (Joined Cases 205/82 to 215/82 Deutsche Milchkontor v Germany [1983] ECR 2633, paragraph 17).
49 Nevertheless, in the first place, that rule must be reconciled with the need to apply Community law uniformly so as to avoid unequal treatment of producers and traders (Deutsche Milchkontor, paragraph 17).
50 Second, the national rules on set-off must not make set-off between an amount due to the beneficiary of aid under a Community measure and an outstanding debt to the Member State subject to less favourable conditions or procedures than those applicable to set-off between claims of purely domestic origin (see, mutatis mutandis, Case 33/76 Rewe v Landwirtschaftskammer Saarland [1976] ECR 1989, paragraph 5, Case 45/76 Comet v Produktschap voor Siergewassen [1976] ECR 2043, paragraph 13, and Case 54/81 Fromme v BALM [1982] ECR 1449, paragraph 6).
51 Indeed, the principle of non-discrimination implies that the obligations imposed by national legislation on beneficiaries of Community aid must not be more stringent than those imposed on the beneficiaries of similar advantages or aid based on national law - always provided that the two groups of recipients are in comparable situations and therefore that that different treatment is not objectively justifiable (Fromme, cited above, paragraph 7).
59 Next, it must be noted that it is expressly stated in the second recital in the preamble to the Regulation that the object of the compensatory payments is to compensate the loss of income caused by the reduction of the institutional prices as part of a new support system for the producers of certain arable crops as a result of reform of the common agricultural policy.