Action brought on 21 November 2014 — Italy v Commission

(Case T-770/14)

Language of the case: Italian

Parties

Applicant: Italian Republic (represented by: P. Gentili, avvocato dello Stato, and G. Palmieri, Agent)

Defendant: European Commission

Form of order sought

The applicant claims that the Court should:

annul the note of 11 September 2014 (reference: Ares (2014) 2 975 571) by which the European Commission notified the Italian Republic of the automatic decommitment, on 31 December 2013, of resources relating to ERDF commitments referred to in the Italy-Malta Cross-border Cooperation Programme 2007-2013; and, ruling on the substance, declare the expenditure and the applications for payment at issue in the present case to be eligible.

Pleas in law and main arguments

In support of its action, the applicant relies on four pleas in law.

First plea in law: failure to state reasons pursuant to the second paragraph of Article 296 TFEU. 

The applicant claims in that regard that, in tersely confirming in the contested decision that the error in the title of the amending decision of 31 December 2012 had no effect on the content of the decision itself or on the implementation of the programme, the Commission neglected to take into consideration the relevance of the following circumstances: (i) the spending decisions adopted by the Region had to be checked beforehand by the Court of Auditors; (ii) four months had elapsed between the correction being announced and the correction being implemented, without any explanation being provided; (iii) that fact had the potential to arouse the suspicion that the correction to be made was of greater importance than a correction supposedly relating only to the title of the decision of 31 December 2012; and (iv) the Court of Auditors had confirmed that the course of action taken by the Region, which refrained from adopting the commitments until the correction was officially recognised (28 March 2013), was correct, thus giving it to be understood that the opposite course of action would not have been correct.

Second plea in law: failure to observe the principle of partnership in the management of structural funds, the principle of cooperation between Member States and EU institutions, and the principle of respecting the constitutional identity of Member States.

The applicant claims in that regard that the Commission failed to cooperate with the Member State in order to enable that State to implement the operational programme as effectively as possible, avoiding disqualifications, and that it neglected to take into consideration (inter alia) the procedural constraints of the internal checks — in particular those carried out by the Court of Auditors — which the State in question was obliged to undergo.

Third plea in law: infringement of Article 96(c) of Council Regulation (EC) No 1083/2006 of 11 July 2006 laying down general provisions on the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1260/1999.

The applicant claims in that regard that the situation generated in the circumstances of the case constituted a reason of force majeure preventing the filing of an application for payment in connection with the projects affected by the amending decision. The national administrative authorities were thereby wholly prevented from carrying the project management procedure through to the stage of submitting an application for payment because of the following circumstances: (i) the Commission’s initial error when notifying that decision; (ii) the promise, immediately following that error, that a swift correction would be made to the title alone; and (iii) the silence which was maintained instead for four months, which suggested that there were other, more important, errors and defects to be corrected.

As its fourth and final plea in law, the applicant alleges failure to observe the principle of proportionality.