Language of document :

Action brought on 15 September 2006 - Dittert v Commission

(Case F-109/06)

Language of the case: French

Parties

Applicant: Daniel Dittert (Luxembourg, Luxembourg) (represented by: B. Cortese and C. Cortese, lawyers)

Defendant: Commission of the European Communities

Form of order sought

annul the decision of the Appointing Authority to award a number of priority points to the applicant which was insufficient to allow his promotion in the 2005 promotion procedure and not to promote him in that promotion procedure, as confirmed by the decision of 6 June 2006, rejecting the applicant's complaint No R/73/06

order the defendant to pay the costs

Pleas in law and main arguments

In support of his application, the applicant puts forward a single plea: the contested decision is tainted by serious defects resulting from a procedural irregularity and from an infringement of the principle of good administration and of the duty to have regard for the welfare of officials.

Following a technical problem, which remains unexplained, the applicant's file was not taken into account by his Directorate-General when it was allocating priority points in the 2005 promotion procedure. This failure to take the applicant into account constitutes a procedural flaw and an infringement of the principle of good administration and of the duty to have regard for the welfare of officials.

Those irregularities were such as to invalidate the 2005 promotion procedure in so far as it concerned the applicant, and to harm the applicant's interests, since he was allocated fewer priority points than his own superiors (in this case, the Director-General of DG Competition) wished to give him, once the technical problem had been detected. In effect, according to the applicant, DG Competition assured him that, absent the technical problem, it would have allocated to him a sufficient number of points to ensure his promotion to grade AD9, namely 7 points; the DG also expressly asked the A* Promotion Committee to remedy the applicant's situation by allocating that number of points to him. Notwithstanding this, the A* Promotion Committee proposed the allocation of only 4 'points awarded on appeal' to the applicant, and the Appointing Authority followed this advice, with the result that the applicant was allocated an insufficient number of points to allow his promotion to grade AD9 in the 2005 exercise.

The applicant claims that, rather than the remedying of the situation created by the technical problem, the intervention of the A* Promotion Committee and of the Appointing Authority themselves gave rise to procedural irregularities. Thus the A* Promotion Committee exceeded its authority and its powers in proposing to allocate a lower number of points to the applicant than had been proposed by his superiors, once the technical problem had been discovered. Furthermore, both the A* Promotion Committee and the Appointing Authority failed to undertake a real consideration of the applicant's comparative merits.

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