87The justifications put forward by the Italian Republic in this regard, namely that the delay in complying with the judgment was attributable to internal difficulties connected with the complexity of the measures to be taken to identify the recipients of the unlawful aid in question and recover the aid from them, cannot be accepted. As the Court has repeatedly held, a Member State cannot plead provisions, practices or situations prevailing in its domestic legal order to justify failure to observe obligations arising under European Union law (see, inter alia, Case C-568/07 Commission v Greece [2009] ECR I-4505, paragraph 50), and the elimination of unlawful aid by means of recovery is the logical consequence of the finding that it is unlawful and that consequence cannot depend on the form in which the aid was granted (see, to that effect, Commission v Poland, paragraph 54 and the case-law cited).
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