Caroline Buts, Malgorzata Agnieszka Cyndecka, Wout De Cock, Grith Skovgaard Ølykke, Maria Segura

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 23 (2024), Issue 2, Page 173 - 199

Wolfgang Weiß

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 23 (2024), Issue 2, Page 101 - 114

Sport has been a recurring topic for the CJEU in its application of EU law since the 1970s, but until recently it was hardly relevant to the area of State aid. This has changed significantly since 2019, when the GC annulled Commission decisions on State aid in the professional football sector, followed by two CJEU rulings in 2021 and 2022. The article will show that the judicial application of State aid law in these cases was not unique (especially as sport-specific claims by football clubs were considered irrelevant), that the cases provided insights of general importance for State aid law (eg regarding the standard of proof) and that Article 165 TFEU does not provide a specific exception. Keywords: State aid and sport; Spanish football cases; notion of aid; selectivity; standard of proof

Wout De Cock, Caroline Buts, Malgorzata Agnieszka Cyndecka, Maria Segura

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 22 (2023), Issue 3, Page 290 - 328

Caroline Buts, Wout De Cock

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 21 (2022), Issue 3, Page 278 - 301

Caroline Buts, Malgorzata Agnieszka Cyndecka, José Luis Buendía

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 20 (2021), Issue 3, Page 397 - 426

Sebastiaan Cnossen, Georges Dictus

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 20 (2021), Issue 1, Page 30 - 40

More than five years ago, the European Commission provided further guidance on local support measures by establishing three criteria in order to exclude an effect on trade. As authors explain in this article, this approach fits well within the existing case law of the CJEU and has also been recently endorsed by the General Court. At the same time, authors critically assess the decision practice of the Commission which often lacks a solid assessment of the three criteria. This detracts from the Commission's self-proclaimed goal to be 'big on big, small on small' and further reduce the administrative burden for public authorities and companies. This articles therefore calls upon the Commission to provide more legal certainty on the effect on trade criterion by taking the assessment of this criterion more seriously and create more precedents that stakeholders can rely on. Keywords: effect on trade; local aid; cross-border; marginal effect; notion of aid

Antonios Bouchagiar

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 19 (2020), Issue 1, Page 19 - 28

The case-law on the notion of ‘State resources’ includes several landmark cases, where the Court of Justice has carefully delineated the scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction under EU State aid law. The present article aims at presenting a consistent interpretation of that case-law, starting from the Sloman Neptun judgment in 1993 up to the very recent judgments in EEG and in Achema in 2019. Although an isolated reading of the latter two judgments may give the impression that they contradict each other, the author is of the view that such impression would be erroneous and based on incomplete information. When seen in the full context of the case-law on the notion of ‘State resources’, those two judgments are perfectly complementary. The article concludes by presenting the three alternative situations where State resources would be present according to the case-law as it stands today. Keywords: State resources; Notion of aid; State control.