By virtue of Article 168a of the Treaty and the first paragraph of Article 51 of the Statute of the Court of Justice, an appeal may be based only on grounds relating to the infringement of rules of law, to the exclusion of any appraisal of the facts. As regards matters of evidence, it is for the Court of First Instance alone to assess the value which should be attached to the evidence adduced before it, save where the sense of that evidence has been distorted.
Having regard to the legal nature of comfort letters, the sending of such a letter, in which the Commission has reserved the right to re-open the procedure in the event of there being any appreciable change affecting certain matters of law or of fact on which its assessment had been based, cannot entail the consequence that the Commission, when actually re-opening the procedure, would no longer be entitled to take account of a factual situation which existed before the comfort letter was sent but was brought to its notice only later, particularly in connection with a complaint lodged at a later stage.
Since Article 3 of Regulation No 17 is to be applied according to the nature of the infringement found, although the Commission may by decision require undertakings and associations of undertakings to bring to an end an infringement of Article 85 of the Treaty deriving from an exclusive purchasing agreement, it may not prohibit the conclusion of any such agreements in the future.
Citations:
C-279/95, [1998] EUECJ C-279/95P
Links:
Jurisdiction:
European
Citing:
See also – Langnese-Iglo and Scholler Lebensmittel v Commission ECFI 8-May-1992
ECJ Where both granting a suspension of operation of a Commission decision prescribing interim measures relating to competition and refusing to grant such suspension would in practice have the effect of depriving . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Litigation Practice
Updated: 03 June 2022; Ref: scu.161665