Press Release: State aid: Commission presents for consultation new draft rules on de minimis subsidies

The European Commission has presented a revised version of new draft ‘de minimis’ rules exempting small subsidies from the notification obligation under EC Treaty state aid rules. The new version takes account of comments made during public consultation on an initial proposal presented in March 2006 (see IP/06/283). The Commission proposes that subsidies of €200,000 or less will not constitute state aid. The exemption is limited to measures for which the inherent state aid amount can be calculated precisely in advance. Guarantees will be covered, under the revised proposal, to the extent that the amount of the underlying loan does not exceed € 1.7 million. Member States and other stakeholders will now be given a second opportunity to comment on the proposal before it is definitively adopted by the Commission later this year. Revision of the de minimis rules constitutes one of the cornerstones of the State Aid Action Plan (see IP/05/680 and MEMO/05/195), designed to simplify the state aid rules, to refine the economic analysis of subsidies and to allow the Commission to concentrate its enforcement on the most distortive cases.