General Court annuls fines of €790 million in Air Cargo proceedings

17/12/15

On 16 December 2015 the General Court, in a series of simultaneous judgments, annulled a Commission Decision imposing cumulative fines of €790 million on various airlines in respect of an infringement of Article 101 TFEU in the air cargo sector.  

The essential point made by the Court was that there was a contradiction between the grounds of the decision and its operative part. In particular, when reading the grounds of the Decision and the articles of its operative part, the Court was not in a position to assess whether the evidence adduced by the Commission in order to establish the existence of a single and continuous infringement was sufficient to establish the existence of the four infringements found in the operative part of that Decision.   

One matter on which the Court placed particular emphasis is that the Decision is or may be relevant to claims for damages in national courts and that the inconsistency between the grounds of the Decision and its operative part gave rise to a risk that a national court would take a decision contrary to that adopted by the Commission.  Notably, this applied not only if it gave a different legal classification to the anticompetitive conduct examined, but also if its decision differed from that of the Commission as regards the temporal or geographic scope of the conduct examined or as regards the liability (or non-liability) of persons investigated in relation to the conduct at issue and whose liability was examined in the Decision.  The latter point in particular is an extension of the law.

The judgment can be found here