Action brought on 29 November 2006- Alcoa Trasformazioni v Commission
(Case T-332/06)
Language of the case: English
Parties
Applicant: Alcoa Trasformazioni Srl (Portoscuso, Italy), (represented by: M. Siragusa, T. Müller-Ibord, F. M. Salerno and T. Graf, lawyers)
Defendant: Commission of the European Communities
Form of order sought
To annul the Commission Decision of 19 July 2006
1, in so far as it relates to the applicant and the electricity tariffs payable by the applicant at Portovesme and Fusina or, in the alternative, to annul the decision to the extent that it treats these tariffs as unlawful new aid;
to order the Commission to bear the costs of the present proceedings.
Pleas in law and main arguments
The application at stake is made pursuant to Article 230 EC for the annulment of Commission Decision of 19 July 2006 (hereinafter 'the 2006 Decision'), which qualified electricity tariffs applicable to the applicant's aluminium plants located in Portovesme in Sardinia and Fusina in the Veneto region as unlawful new aid and initiated formal proceedings against these tariffs pursuant to Article 88(2)EC.
The applicant submits that the 2006 decision is erroneous and unlawful in that it departs from the Commission's own previous decision holding that the tariffs in question do not constitute state aid and disregards the procedure that the Commission should follow in such a case. More specifically, the applicant raises three pleas in law:
First, the applicant submits that by opening formal proceedings against the tariffs in question and by qualifying them as unlawful new aid the Commission committed a manifest error of assessment and infringed Article 88(2) because (i) there was no basis for finding that the tariffs provide an advantage resulting in state aid and (ii) the Commission did not conduct any meaningful assessment on whether the tariffs effectively provide such an advantage to the applicant. Moreover, the applicant puts forward that, as confirmed by 'the 1996 Decision', the tariffs correspond to the prices that one would expect a rational market operator to charge under normal market conditions and therefore do not create an advantage for the applicant resulting in aid. The 2006 Decision, by contrast, merely asserts that the tariffs create an advantage without conducting any such assessment. In so doing, the Commission allegedly ignored its own findings as set out in the previous decision and its own factual observations made in the present one, which confirm there is no such advantage. In addition, the applicant contends that the Commission infringed its obligation under Article 253EC to provide adequate reasoning.
Second, the applicant submits that the Commission violated principles of legal certainty and legitimate expectations by effectively revoking 'the 1996 Decision' and qualifying the tariffs as new state aid in clear contradiction with its previous findings. In the applicant's view, the Commission's initial conclusions continue to hold as long as the considerations on which the Commission's original decision was based do not materially change.
Third, the applicant claims the Commission infringed Article 88 EC and the procedural framework provided by this provision for
existing aid, as well as Articles 1(b)(v) and 17-19 of Regulation (EC) 659/99
2 and fundamental principles of EC law.