Scania is mandated to pay the €880.523 million fine levied by the European Commission for a cartel affecting the sale of commercial vehicles that also involved other European manufacturers. This decision was made by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which on February 1, 2024, rejected Scania's appeal, thus upholding the antitrust decision. According to the European Commission, three companies of the Scania Group (Scania AB, Scania CV AB, and Scania Deutschland GmbH) were part of an agreement with some competitors, active from January 1997 to January 2011.
In today's judgment (which represents an appeal to a previous decision of the General Court), the judges state that Scania failed to prove its main reason for seeking the annulment of the fine, namely that the General Court's administrative procedure was not in line with the principle of impartiality. The Court of Justice noted that the mere fact the same Commission team was responsible for both the adoption of the settlement decision and the final decision regarding Scania does not, in itself, question the impartiality of that institution in the absence of any other objective evidence.
The Court of Justice also dismissed Scania's arguments that the General Court had erroneously characterized the geographical scope of its conduct at the German level meetings as extending to the entire territory of the European Economic Area. Similarly, the Court of Justice refuted the premise that, to establish the existence of a single and continuous infringement, the General Court should have required the Commission to also prove that each of the acts concerned, taken individually, constituted an infringement in itself.
Finally, the Court of Justice observes that, in light of its analysis of the arguments presented by Scania, the conclusion of the Commission, and subsequently that of the General Court, that the infringement in question ended on January 18, 2011, must be considered valid. Thus, the five-year limitation period began to run from that date, and the Commission's power to impose a fine was therefore not time-barred. With this judgment, the judicial saga related to this cartel comes to an end.
