Regulation 2013/734 - Amendment of Regulation (EC) No 659/1999 laying down detailed rules for the application of Article 93 of the EC Treaty - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 204/15

In the context of a thorough modernisation of State aid rules, to contribute both to the implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy for growth (1) and to budgetary consolidation, Article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) should be applied effectively and uniformly throughout the Union. Regulation (EC) No 659/1999 (2) codified and reinforced the Commission’s previous practice of increasing legal certainty and supporting the development of State aid policy in a transparent environment. However, in the light of the experience gained in its application and of recent developments such as the enlargement of the Union and the economic and financial crisis, certain aspects of Regulation (EC) No 659/1999 should be amended in order to enable the Commission to be more effective.

In order to assess the compatibility with the internal market of any notified or unlawful State aid for which the Commission has exclusive competence under Article 108 of the TFEU, it is appropriate to ensure that the Commission has the power, for the purposes of enforcing the State aid rules, to request all necessary market information from any Member State, undertaking or association of undertakings whenever it has doubts as to the compatibility of the measure concerned with the Union rules, and has therefore initiated the formal investigation procedure. In particular, the Commission should use this power in cases in which a complex substantive assessment appears necessary. In deciding whether to use this power, the Commission should take due account of the duration of the preliminary investigation.

For the purpose of assessing the compatibility of an aid measure after the initiation of the formal investigation procedure, in particular as regards technically complex cases subject to substantive assessment, the Commission should be able, by simple request or by decision, to require any Member State, undertaking or association of undertakings to provide all market information necessary for completing its assessment, if the information provided by the Member State concerned during the course of the preliminary investigation is not sufficient, taking due account of the principle of proportionality, in particular for small and medium-sized enterprises.

In the light of the special relationship between aid beneficiaries and the Member State concerned, the Commission should be able to request information from an aid beneficiary only in agreement with the Member State concerned. The provision of information by the beneficiary of the aid measure in question does not constitute a legal basis for bilateral negotiations between the Commission and the beneficiary in question.

The Commission should select the addressees of information requests on the basis of objective criteria appropriate to each case, while ensuring that, when the request is addressed to a sample of undertakings or associations thereof, the sample of respondents is representative within each category. The information sought should consist, in particular, of factual company and market data and facts-based analysis of the functioning of the market.

The Commission, as the initiator of the procedure, should be responsible for verifying both the...