Reports of Cases before the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance V. 2014-7

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2014-7 Reports of Cases before the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance 1 (2014)

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VRw Reports of Cases

Case C-242/13

Commerz Nederland NV
V
Havenbedrijf Rotterdam NV

(Request for a preliminary ruling from the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden)

(Reference for a preliminary ruling - Competition - State aid - Article 107(1) TFEU - Definition of
aid - Guarantees provided by a public undertaking to a bank to facilitate lending to third party
creditors - Guarantees deliberately provided by the director of that public undertaking in disregard of
that undertaking's statutes - Presumption of opposition by the public body that owns that
undertaking - Whether the guarantees may be imputed to the State)

Summary - Judgment of the Court (Second Chamber), 17 September 2014

1. Judicial procedure - Request to have the oral procedure reopened - Request to lodge observations
on the points of law raised by the Advocate General's opinion - Conditions for the reopening

(Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 23; Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice, Art. 83)

2. State aid - Concept - Guarantees provided by a public undertaking - Whether imputable to the
public authority controlling that undertaking - Set of indicators to be taken into consideration

(Art. 107(1) TFEU)

1. See the text of the decision.

(see para. 26)

2. Article 107(1) TFEU must be interpreted as meaning that, for the purposes of determining whether
or not the guarantees provided by a public undertaking are imputable to the public authority
controlling that undertaking, the following are relevant, together with the body of evidence arising
from the circumstances of the case in the main proceedings and from the context in which they took
place: (i) that the sole director of the company providing those guarantees acted improperly,
deliberately kept the provision of those guarantees secret and disregarded the undertaking's statutes
and (ii) that that public authority would have opposed the provision of those guarantees, had it been
informed of it. However, those circumstances are not, in themselves, capable of excluding such
imputability.

(see para. 39 and operative part)

ECLJ:EU:C:2014:22241

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