NV Koninklijke KNP BT v Commission of the European Communities.
Date: 2000-11-16
31 The Court of First Instance first of all referred, in paragraph 67 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).
54 As to the second part of this plea, it should be observed that the Court of First Instance has unlimited jurisdiction when it rules on the amount of fines imposed on undertakings for infringements of Community law and that it is not for the Court of Justice, when ruling on questions of law in the context of an appeal, to substitute, on grounds of fairness, its own assessment for that of the Court of First Instance in the matter (Ferriere Nord v Commission, cited above, paragraph 31).
61 The plea here under consideration is inoperative. Even if the appellant had in fact adduced the necessary evidence at the hearing before the Court of First Instance to support its argument that the Commission had wrongly taken into account intra-group sales of cartonboard in order to fix the fine, that argument could not be upheld in the light of Article 15(2) of Regulation No 17 which aims to ensure that the penalty is proportionate to the undertaking's size on the product market in respect of which the infringement was committed (see, to that effect, Joined Cases 100/80 to 103/80 Musique Diffusion Française and Others v Commission [1983] ECR 1825, paragraph 119).
62 As the Court of First Instance itself rightly held in its judgment in Case T-304/94 Europa Carton v Commission [1998] ECR II-869, paragraph 128: To ignore the value of the applicant's internal cartonboard deliveries would inevitably give an unjustified advantage to vertically integrated companies. In such a case the benefit derived from the cartel might not be taken into account and the undertaking in question would avoid the imposition of a fine proportionate to its importance on the product market to which the infringement relates.
71 In its written pleas to the Court and in its reply to a written question put by the Court, the Commission explained that the fines were calculated on the basis of the turnover on the Community cartonboard market in 1990 of each undertaking addressed by the Decision. Fines of a basic level of 9 or 7.5% of that individual turnover were then imposed, respectively, on the undertakings considered to be the cartel "ringleaders" and on the other undertakings. Finally, the Commission took into account any cooperation by undertakings during the procedure before it. Two undertakings received a reduction of two thirds of the amount of their fines on that basis, while other undertakings received a reduction of one third.