Judgment of the Court of Justice Second Chamber, 16 February 2023, Tráficos Manuel Ferrer, C-312/21

• Date: 16 February 2023
• Year: 2023

14

2.ACTIONS FOR COMPENSATION FOR THE HARM CAUSED BY

INFRINGEMENTS OF COMPETITION RULES

Judgment of the Court of Justice (Second Chamber), 16 February 2023, Tráficos Manuel

Ferrer, C-312/21

Link to the full text of the judgment

Reference for a preliminary ruling –Competition –Compensation for harm caused by a practice

prohibited under Article 101(1) TFEU – Decision of the Commission finding the existence of collusive

arrangements on pricing and gross price increases for trucks in the European Economic Area (EEA) –

National rule of civil procedure under which, in the event that the claim is upheld in part, costs are to be

borne by each party, except in cases of wrongful conduct – Procedural autonomy of the Member States –

Principles of effectiveness and equivalence –Directive 2014/104/EU– Objectives and overall balance –

Article 3 – Right to full compensation for the harm suffered – Article 11(1) – Joint and several liability of the

undertakings that infringe competition law – Article 17(1) – Possibility for national courts to estimate the

harm – Conditions – Impossibility or unreasonable difficulties in quantifying harm – Article 22 – Temporal

application

By a decision of 19 July 2016,

15

the European Commission found that Daimler AG had infringed the

EU law rules prohibiting cartels

16

in that Daimler had concluded, between January 1997 and January

2011, arrangements with 14 other European truck manufacturers on pricing and gross price increases

for trucks in the European Economic Area (EEA).

Following that decision, the Spanish undertakings Tráficos Manuel Ferrer SL and D. Ignacio (‘the

applicants in the main proceedings’), which had, inter alia, purchased lorries manufactured by Daimler

during the infringement period, brought an action for damages before the Juzgado de lo Mercantil

no 3 de Valencia (Commercial Court No 3, Valencia, Spain) against that company on the basis of the

wrongful conduct found by the Commission.

In order to quantify the harm suffered, the applicants in the main proceedings produced an expert

report finding an average overcharge of 16.35% on the market affected by the cartel.

Since, during the period of the infringement, one of the applicants in the main proceedings had also

purchased lorries manufactured by other addressees of the decision of 19 July 2016, namely Renault

Trucks SAS and Iveco SpA, Daimler applied to the national court for those companies to be joined to

the proceedings. By order of 22 September 2020, that court dismissed that application.

Daimler disputed the merits of the action for damages, in particular by producing its own expert

report. Following a preliminary hearing, the applicants in the main proceedings were given access to

the data taken into consideration in the expert report submitted by Daimler, with the twofold aim of

allowing a more thorough criticism of those data and of leading to a possible reformulation of their

own expert report.

After hearing the parties to the main proceedings discuss their respective expert reports, Commercial

Court No 3, Valencia, decided to refer the matter to the Court of Justice in order to determine, in

essence, whether, in the light of EU law, it was entitled and, if so, under what conditions, to carry out

15

Commission Decision C(2016) 4673 final relating to a proceeding under Article 101 [TFEU] and Article 53 of the EEA Agreement (Case

AT.39824

16

Article 101 TFEU and Article 53 of the Agreement on the European Economic Area of 2 May 1992 (OJ 1994 L 1, p. 3).