On annulment of the EU Commission's requests for information and could the ECJ go further in its judgements?
Abstract
The article analyses recent judgements of the European Court of Justice, which annulled the judgements of the General Court and the EU Commission's decision requesting information by which the EU Commission required the undertakings active in the cement industry to provide it with substantial amount of information and documents in order to investigate suspected infringements of the competition law. At the start of the following article the subject matter and the course of investigative steps of the cement case will be described and then the judgements of the General Court and the European Court of Justice concerning the action for annulment of the decision requesting information will be analyzed.
In a view of the fact that the European Court of Justice dealt only with one of seven grounds of appeal, the main aim of this article is to point out and analyze key remarks of the advocate general, who on the other hand dealt with all grounds of appeal raised by the undertakings concerned and the reasoning of its opinions could have substantial importance not only in the present case, but in the interpretation of the law concerning request for information, which could ultimately limit the European Commission's practice concerning issuing decisions requesting information in the future cases.