559JFE-Kawasaki and Sumitomo argue that the level of the fine imposed on the Japanese producers for supposedly agreeing to refrain from selling the products mentioned in Article 1 of the contested decision in Europe is disproportionate by comparison with the level of the fines imposed on the European producers. The latter in fact are alleged to have committed two infringements the purpose of which was to ring-fence European markets, conferring on their infringement an intra-Community aspect absent from the infringement alleged against the Japanese producers. The Commission thus breached the principle of nondiscrimination, which precludes different situations being treated in the same way without objective justification (Case C-342/93 Gillespie [1996] ECR I-475, paragraph 16, and the Guidelines). Sumitomo states that it is unfair to draw inferences from the fact that the infringement found in Article 2 of the contested decision supposedly forms part of the infringement found in Article 1 because the Commission does not allege that the agreement between the European and Japanese producers required the European producers to commit that further infringement. Moreover, it follows that the Japanese applicants indeed had an interest in disputing the Commission's reasoning in recital 164 to the contested decision according to which no additional fine should be imposed on the European producers.
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