Commission of the European Communities v Schneider Electric SA.
Date: 2009-07-16
103. Moreover, it is clear from Article 225 EC and the first paragraph of Article 58 of the Statute of the Court of Justice that the Court of First Instance has exclusive jurisdiction, first, to find the facts, except where the substantive inaccuracy of its findings is apparent from the documents submitted to it and, second, to assess those facts. The Court of Justice thus has no jurisdiction to establish the facts or, in principle, to examine the evidence which the Court of First Instance accepted in support of those facts. Provided that the evidence has been properly obtained and the general principles of law and the rules of procedure in relation to the burden of proof and the taking of evidence have been observed, it is for the Court of First Instance alone to assess the value which should be attached to the evidence produced to it. Save where the clear sense of the evidence has been distorted, that appraisal does not therefore constitute a point of law which is subject as such to review by the Court of Justice (see, inter alia, Case C‑413/06 P Bertelsmann and Sony Corporation of America  v Impala [2008] ECR I‑0000, paragraph 29).
104. In other words, the finding of facts and the appraisal of evidence by the Court of First Instance constitute points of law subject to review by the Court of Justice on appeal where the substantive inaccuracy of the findings of the Court of First Instance is apparent from the documents submitted to it or the clear sense of the evidence has been distorted (see, to that effect, Case C‑119/97 P Ufex and Others v Commission [1999] ECR I-1341, paragraph 66).
135. It is clear from established case-law that the obligation to state reasons does not require the Court of First Instance to provide an account which follows exhaustively and one by one all the arguments put forward by the parties to the case and that the reasoning may therefore be implicit on condition that it enables the persons concerned to know why the Court of First Instance has not upheld their arguments and provides the Court of Justice with sufficient material for it to exercise its power of review (see, in particular, Joined Cases C‑120/96 P and C‑121/06 P FIAMM and Others  v Council and Commission [2008] ECR I‑0000, paragraph 96 and the case-law cited).
160. For the non-contractual liability of the Community to arise, a number of conditions must be met, including, where the unlawfulness of a legal measure is at issue, the existence of a sufficiently serious breach of a rule of law intended to confer rights on individuals. As regards that condition, the decisive criterion for establishing that a breach of Community law is sufficiently serious is whether the Community institution concerned manifestly and gravely disregarded the limits on its discretion. Where that institution has only considerably reduced, or even no, discretion, the mere infringement of Community law may be sufficient to establish the existence of a sufficiently serious breach (Case C‑282/05 P Holcim (Deutschland) v Commission [2007] ECR I‑2941, paragraph 47 and the case-law cited).
191. When the Court of First Instance has found or assessed the facts, the Court of Justice has jurisdiction under Article 225 EC to review the legal characterisation of those facts by the Court of First Instance and the legal conclusions it has drawn from them (see, inter alia, Bertelsmann and Sony Corporation of America  v Impala , paragraph 29, and Case C‑510/06 P Archer Daniels Midland  v Commission [2009] ECR I‑0000, paragraph 105).
192. So far as the non-contractual liability of the Community is concerned, the question as to whether there is a causal link between the wrongful act and the damage, a condition for that liability to be incurred, is a question of law which, as a consequence, is subject to review by the Court of Justice.
193. In those conditions, the third part of the third ground of appeal is admissible, inasmuch as (i) the very thing it seeks is a review of the Court of First Instance’s legal characterisation of the facts in holding there to be a direct causal link between the Commission’s unlawful act and the loss claimed by Schneider and (ii) as will be shown below, that review can be carried out in the present case without calling in question the relevant findings and assessments of facts.