ECFI 1. The statement of reasons in decisions adopted by the Community institutions must be such as to enable the Community judicature to exercise its power of review of the legality of the decision and to enable the person concerned to ascertain the matters justifying the measure adopted, so that he can defend his rights and verify whether the decision is well founded.
A decision by which the Commission refuses to recognize the existence of aid must be regarded as being sufficiently reasoned where the facts and legal considerations essential to the decision are set out, even though not all the Commission’ s reasoning is revealed. The person adopting a decision is not required to give all the relevant factual and legal details and the question whether the statement of the reasons on which a decision is based is sufficient may be assessed with regard not only to its wording but also to the context in which it was adopted and to all the legal rules governing the matter in question.
2. A measure cannot be described as State aid within the meaning of Article 92(1) of the Treaty if it has not provided any advantage to the alleged recipient.
The Commission was thus right, after carrying out complex economic appraisals, to decide that the arrangements made by the public authorities, whereby the body responsible for managing betting on horse-races in one Member State, having deducted a levy on bets which it takes on behalf of the equivalent body in another Member State on races held in the second Member State, transfers a proportion of the levy to the latter body, do not constitute State aid, even though those arrangements are different from those applied in relation to bets on races run on national territory if, after an examination of all the arrangements governing the flow of funds between the two bodies managing, each on its own territory, betting on races, it reached the conclusion, without committing any manifest error of assessment, that the transfer of levy does not involve sums higher than the recipient body would have collected if it had itself taken abroad the bets relating to the races falling under its sphere of responsibility.
Citations:
T-471/93, [1995] EUECJ T-471/93
Links:
European
Updated: 06 June 2022; Ref: scu.172694