ANESCO: Maintaining an Orthodox View on the Admissibility of Requests for a Preliminary Ruling

摘要

On 16 September 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that a request for a preliminary ruling from the Spanish Competition Authority (Comision National de los Mercados y la Competencia; hereinafter CNMC) was inadmissible since it could not be regarded as having the nature of a 'court or tribunal' for the purposes of Article 267 TFEU. The request for a preliminary ruling is related to an alleged anticompetitive practice in the provision in Spain of stowage services. In 2017, the Kingdom of Spain adopted a Decree with the aim of complying with the judgment of the Court of Justice of 11 December 2014, Commission v Spain (C-576/13, EU:C:2014:2430), according to which the Spanish regulation of cargo-handling services infringed Article 49 TFEU. The Decree provided for the free recruitment of port workers in order to provide cargo-handling services and introduced a transitional adjustment period of 3 years.