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16 December 20101
(C-239/09)
(State aid - Aid granted by the Federal Republic of Germany for the acquisition of land - Programme for land privatisation and restructuring of agriculture in the new Länder in Germany)
Summary
Guiding Principles:2
1. The Court of Justice may only rule on the interpretation or validity of acts of the European Union, not on national laws. As such, and in order to provide a useful answer to the national court, the Court of Justice may reformulate the referred question.
2. Not only positive benefits but also forms of mitigating costs normally incurred by an undertaking are considered as constituting State aid.
3. The sale of public land at a lower than market value price may constitute State aid. Market value refers to the price which a private investor, operating in normal competitive conditions, would have been able to fix.
4. In order to comply with Article 107 TFEU (ex-Article 87 EC), national laws establishing rules for calculating the market value of land must lead to a price as close as possible to the market value. Accordingly, while the best bid and expert reports are likely to indicate actual market value prices, other methods are not to be excluded.
5. A national method, which does not include an update mechanism to reflect a price increase as far as possible, is not suitable for calculating market prices. National authorities are therefore required to disapply any provision establishing a method that leads to results far from the market value.
6. Article 107 TFEU (ex-Article 87 EC) does not preclude a national provision establishing a method for determining the value of agricultural and forestry land sold by public authorities in the context of a privatization plan when such a method enables prices to be updated so as to ensure that the purchase price reflects the market price.
In Case C-239/09,
REFERENCE for a preliminary ruling under Article 234 EC from the Landgericht Berlin (Germany), made by decision of 18 June 2009, received at the Court on 1 July 2009, in the proceedings
Seydaland Vereinigte Agrarbetriebe GmbH & Co. KG
v
BVVG Bodenverwertungs- und -verwaltungs GmbH,
THE COURT (First Chamber),
[...]
gives the following
Judgment
1. This reference for a preliminary ruling concerns the...