Case C‑242/13
Commerz Nederland NV
v
Havenbedrijf Rotterdam NV
(Request for a preliminary ruling
from the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden)
(Reference for a preliminary ruling — Competition — State aid — Article 107(1) TFEU — Definition of aid — Guarantees provided by a public undertaking to a bank to facilitate lending to third party creditors — Guarantees deliberately provided by the director of that public undertaking in disregard of that undertaking’s statutes — Presumption of opposition by the public body that owns that undertaking — Whether the guarantees may be imputed to the State)
Summary — Judgment of the Court (Second Chamber), 17 September 2014
1. Judicial procedure — Request to have the oral procedure reopened — Request to lodge observations on the points of law raised by the Advocate General’s opinion — Conditions for the reopening
(Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 23; Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice, Art. 83)
2. State aid — Concept — Guarantees provided by a public undertaking — Whether imputable to the public authority controlling that undertaking — Set of indicators to be taken into consideration
(Art. 107(1) TFEU)
1. See the text of the decision.
(see para. 26)
2. Article 107(1) TFEU must be interpreted as meaning that, for the purposes of determining whether or not the guarantees provided by a public undertaking are imputable to the public authority controlling that undertaking, the following are relevant, together with the body of evidence arising from the circumstances of the case in the main proceedings and from the context in which they took place: (i) that the sole director of the company providing those guarantees acted improperly, deliberately kept the provision of those guarantees secret and disregarded the undertaking’s statutes and (ii) that that public authority would have opposed the provision of those guarantees, had it been informed of it. However, those circumstances are not, in themselves, capable of excluding such imputability.
(see para. 39 and operative part)