Press Release: State aid: Commission publishes study on national enforcement of state aid rules

The European Commission on 7 April 2006 published the findings of a study reviewing the enforcement of EU state aid rules at national level. On the one hand, the study confirmed that companies were increasingly relying on state aid law to defend themselves before national courts against financial burdens imposed on them by the state. On the other hand, companies rarely used state aid rules as an instrument to challenge the distortion of competition caused by unlawful subsidies granted to competitors. The study also concluded that Member States needed to speed up the implementation of the European Commission’s recovery decisions. All too often, excessively long administrative and judicial procedures at national level resulted in unacceptable delays in the recovery of illegal aid.