Metsä-Serla Sales Oy v Commission of the European Communities.
Date: 2000-11-16
33 The Court of First Instance first of all referred, in paragraph 300 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).
56 It should be observed in that regard that Article 15(2) of Regulation No 17 does not lay down an exhaustive list of the criteria which the Commission may take into account when fixing the amount of the fine (see Case C-219/95 P Ferriere Nord v Commission [1997] ECR I-4411, paragraphs 32 and 33). The conduct of the undertaking during the administrative procedure may therefore be one of the factors to be taken into account when fixing that fine (see Case C-277/87 Sandoz Prodotti Farmaceutici v Commission [1990] ECR I-45, summary publication).
58 Nor, second, can the complaint of infringement of the rights of the defence be upheld. An undertaking which, when challenging the Commission's stance, limits its cooperation to that which it is required to provide under Regulation No 17 will not, on that ground, have an increased fine imposed on it. If the Commission considers that it has proved the existence of an infringement and that the infringement can be imputed to the undertaking, the undertaking will be fined in accordance with criteria which may lawfully be taken into account and which are subject to review by the Court of First Instance or the Court of Justice. As the Advocate General has stated in point 25 of his Opinion, the appellant's premiss is based on the purely theoretical hypothesis of an undertaking's accusing itself of an infringement which it has not committed, contrary to the Commission's own view, in the hope of receiving a reduction in the fine which it nevertheless fears will be imposed on it. Such an assumption cannot serve as a basis for an argument alleging infringement of rights of the defence.
59 Last, as regards the alleged inadequate statement of reasons in the Decision for the reductions granted, it suffices to observe that the Court of First Instance stated in paragraph 303 of the contested judgment:
in points 171 and 172, the Commission states that the amounts of fines imposed on Rena and Stora must be considerably reduced in order to take account of their active cooperation with the Commission, and that eight other undertakings, including the applicant, were also to benefit from a reduction, to a lesser extent, owing to the fact that in their replies to the statement of objections they did not contest the essential factual allegations on which the Commission based its objections.
60 Those points in the Decision contain an adequate statement of reasons for the reductions in the fines.
66 It must be held in that regard that, as the Commission has stated, when a fine is imposed on an association of undertakings, whose own turnover most often does not reflect its size or power on the market, it is only when the turnover of the member undertakings is taken into account that a fine with deterrent effect can be determined (see, to that effect, the judgment in Case 1100/80 to 103/80 Musique Diffusion Française and Others v Commission [1983] ECR 1825, paragraphs 120 and 121). It is not necessary that the members of the association should have actually participated in the infringement, but the association must, by virtue of its internal rules, have been able to bind its members.
82 It follows from the foregoing that 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 74 and 75 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 Musique Diffusion Française and Others v Commission, cited above, 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.