Brussels issues draft guidance on state aid and notification
The European Commission is consulting on a draft guidance notice for identifying state aid measures that need to be notified to Brussels before implementation.
The Commission said it aimed to adopt, in light of submissions, the final guidance notice in the second quarter of 2014.
The draft guidance notice has been produced to explain and illustrate the various elements “constitutive of state aid in the meaning of EU state aid control”:
- The presence of an economic activity (notion of "undertaking");
- The imputability of the measure to the State;
- Financing through State resources;
- The presence of an economic advantage for the beneficiary;
- Selectivity; and
- Effect on trade and competition.
“For example, the paper will help stakeholders to determine whether the sale of a public asset, a capital injection in a company or certain fiscal measures entail state aid that the Commission has to assess before the measures can be implemented, in order to verify that the measure does not unduly distort competition in the Single Market,” the Commission said.
It added: “The notice has been drafted in a pragmatic way, in order to provide useful answers to national governments and courts, as well as other interested parties, rather than discussing theoretical questions.”
The deadline for comments is 14 March 2014. The text of the draft notice can be viewed here.
By way of background, Brussels said: “In providing guidance on the notion of state aid, the Commission is subject to legal constraints. Indeed, the notion of state aid is an objective legal concept defined by the TFEU, which can only be interpreted in a legally binding manner through the Court of Justice of the European Union.
“The Commission's role is thus limited to clarifying how it understands and applies the TFEU provisions in line with the case-law of the EU courts and without prejudice to the interpretation of these provisions by the Court of Justice. In this respect, the notice is thus – at least in part – a guide through the vast body of EU case-law and decisional practice in the field of state aid law. For those aspects of the notion of aid on which there is no or only limited practice, the Commission has limited its guidance to what can be inferred from its interpretation of existing case law.”
The move is part of Brussels’ state aid modernisation programme.
This programme last month saw the Commission adopt a revised regulation on small aid amounts that fall outside the scope of EU state aid control.