Keywords
Summary

Keywords

Actions for annulment - Natural or legal persons - Measures of direct and individual concern to them - Commission regulation on the application of Article 81(3) EC to categories of vertical agreements and concerted practices - Action by distributor undertakings bound by vertical agreements and by associations representing the interests of those undertakings - Inadmissible

(Arts 230, fourth para., EC and 249 EC; Commission Regulation No 2790/1999)

Summary

$$An action for annulment brought by certain small and medium-sized distributor undertakings bound by vertical agreements, and by two associations representing the interests of those undertakings, against Commission Regulation No 2790/1999, on the application of Article 81(3) of the Treaty to categories of vertical agreements and concerted practices, is inadmissible.

First, owing to its scope, the contested regulation is of a legislative nature and is not a decision within the meaning of Article 249 EC. The regulation states that, under certain conditions, Article 81(1) EC does not apply to vertical agreements. It defines its scope in abstract terms and is of general application to undertakings involved in vertical agreements and concerted practices.

Second, the applicants are not affected by the contested regulation because of attributes which are peculiar to them by reason of circumstances in which they are differentiated from all other persons enabling them to be considered to be individually concerned by a measure of general application. The exemption granted by the regulation in question, which prevents the application of Article 81(1) EC, and, consequently, of the penalty of invalidity established by Article 81(2) EC, concerns the applicants in their objective capacity as economic operators bound by vertical agreements, in the same way as all the other operators who are party to such agreements. The state of economic dependence on large suppliers is not a circumstance such as to differentiate the applicants from all the other economic operators since in Europe several tens of thousands of small and medium-sized undertakings are in the same position.

Moreover, an action brought by associations representing their members' interests must be held inadmissible if the action brought by the members themselves is inadmissible.

( see paras 17-18, 20, 22-23, 25 )