EU: Commission adopts new Notice on recovery of illegal State aid

Since 2012, the European Commission (‘Commission’) has implemented the State Aid Modernisation Agenda (‘SAM’). Under the SAM, the Commission has streamlined and consolidated a number of guidelines. A package of legislation has also strengthened the Member States’ responsibility and increased cooperation between the Commission and Member States in the field of State aid enforcement.
As a result, Member States grant more aid without prior control by the Commission. The Juncker Commission has put particular focus on this matter and since 2015, more than 96% of new aid measures for which expenditure was reported for the first time was covered by the General Block Exemption Regulation (‘GBER’) — an absolute increase of about 28 percentage points compared to 2013. The Commission, for its part, has enhanced the downstream monitoring to ensure that Member States remove distortions to competition by recovering the aid which is paid in breach of the State aid rules. This is an important part of the Commission’s overall enforcement agenda.