Judgment_paragraph 40 · Empresa Nacional Siderúrgica SA (Ensidesa) v Commission of the European Communities (C-198/99 P)

40The third limb of the first ground of appeal is directed against paragraphs 143 to 147 of the judgment under appeal, which are worded as follows:143 It must first be pointed out that the first paragraph of Article 16 of the 1993 Rules of Procedure did not define how instruments adopted in the course of a meeting were to be “annexed” to the minutes, in contrast, for example, to Article 16 of the Commission's Rules of Procedure, as amended by Decision 95/148/EC, ECSC, Euratom of 8 March 1995 (OJ 1995 L 97, p. 82), which provides that the instruments in question must be attached to the minutes “in such a way that they cannot be separated”.144 In this case, the minutes were received by the Court accompanied by documents C(94)321/2 and C(94)321/3 in the authentic languages, in the same container which Commission officials state to have received as such from the Commission's Secretariat-General, following the Court's request of 11 March 1998. It can therefore be assumed that those documents were “annexed” to the minutes in the sense that they were placed with those minutes, without being physically attached to them.145 The purpose of the first paragraph of Article 16 of the 1993 Rules of Procedure is to ensure that the Commission has duly adopted the instrument in the form notified to the party to whom it is addressed. In this case, the applicant has failed to establish that there was any substantive difference between the version of the [contested] decision which was notified to it and the version which, according to the Commission, was “annexed” to the minutes.146 In those circumstances, and regard being had to the presumption of validity which Community measures enjoy (Case T-35/92 John Deere v Commission [1994] ECR II-957, paragraph 31), the applicant has failed to establish that documents C(94)321/2 and C(94)321/3 were not “annexed” to the minutes within the meaning of Article 16 of the 1993 Rules of Procedure. Those documents must therefore be regarded as having been authenticated by the signatures of the President and the Secretary-General on the first page of those minutes.147 As regards the fact that the minutes produced before the Court were themselves a photocopy lacking the original signatures of the President and the Secretary-General, it must be pointed out that the first page of that document bears the stamp “certified to be a true copy, Secretary-General Carlo Trojan” and that this stamp bears the original signature of Mr Trojan, the titular Secretary-General of the Commission. The Court takes the view that this certification of authenticity by the titular Secretary-General of the Commission provides sufficient proof for legal purposes that the original version of the minutes bears the original signatures of the President and Secretary-General of the Commission.’

Empresa Nacional Siderúrgica SA (Ensidesa) v Commission of the European Communities (C-198/99 P)

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