Cascades SA v Commission of the European Communities.
Date: 2000-11-16
31 The Court of First Instance first of all referred, in paragraph 208 of the contested judgment, to the settled case-law to the effect that the purpose of the obligation to give reasons for an individual decision is to enable the Community judicature to review the legality of the decision and to provide the party concerned with an adequate indication as to whether the decision is well founded or whether it may be vitiated by some defect enabling its validity to be challenged, the scope of that obligation being dependent on the nature of the act in question and on the context in which it was adopted (see, in particular, besides the case-law cited by the Court of First Instance, Case C-22/94 Irish Farmers Association and Others v Ministry for Agriculture, Food and Forestry, Ireland, and the Attorney General [1997] ECR I-1809, paragraph 39).
62 It follows from the foregoing that, far from confusing the concept of a cartel's restrictive effect on competition and its impact on the market, the Court of First Instance considered, in the exercise of its unlimited jurisdiction, that its findings regarding the effects of the infringement were not such as to alter the Commission's own assessment of the gravity of the infringement, or, more precisely, as to diminish the gravity of the infringement so assessed. It considered, in the light of the specific circumstances of the case and the context in which the infringement took place, as taken into account by the Commission's Decision and set out in paragraphs 56 and 57 of this judgment, and in the light of the deterrent effect of the fines imposed, all being factors which could be applied, in accordance with the case-law of the Court of Justice, in assessing the gravity of the infringement (see Joined Cases 100/80 to 103/80 Musique Diffusion Française and Others v Commission [1983] ECR 1825, paragraph 106; Order in SPO and Others v Commission, cited above, paragraph 54, and Ferriere Nord v Commission, cited above, paragraph 33), that it was not appropriate to reduce the level of the fine.
77 Although the appellant was rightly held liable for the conduct of the two subsidiaries in question with effect from their acquisition, it had not been proved that it could validly be held liable for their infringements prior to that date.
78 It falls, in principle, to the legal or natural person managing the undertaking in question when the infringement was committed to answer for that infringement, even if, when the Decision finding the infringement was adopted, another person had assumed responsibility for operating the undertaking.
79 In the present case, it is apparent from the contested Decision that Djupafors and Duffel participated in their own right in the infringement from mid-1986 until their acquisition by the appellant in March 1989 (see paragraph 18 of the contested judgment). Moreover, those companies were not purely and simply absorbed by the appellant but continued their activities as its subsidiaries. They must, therefore, answer themselves for their unlawful activity prior to their acquisition by the appellant, which cannot be held responsible for it.