Judgment_paragraph 76 · Jinan Meide Casting Co. Ltd v Council of the European Union (T-424/13)

76However, the institutions do not go so far as to submit that, given those circumstances, it was absolutely impossible for the Commission to adopt a decision on MET within the time limit allowed, nor that the late adoption of that decision was a case of force majeure, namely, according to settled case-law, that the non-compliance with the time limit was attributable to circumstances, beyond the control of the institutions, which were abnormal and unforeseeable and the consequences of which could not have been avoided despite the exercise of all due diligence (see, to that effect, judgments of 8 March 1988 in McNicholl and Others, 296/86, ECR, EU:C:1988:125, paragraph 11, and 4 March 2010 in Commission v Italy, C‑297/08, ECR, EU:C:2010:115, paragraph 85). In any event, even if the institutions, by setting out the circumstances referred to in paragraph 75 above, intended to rely on the notion of force majeure, it must be held that, in the present case, the criteria, laid down by the case-law cited above, for that notion to apply are clearly not fulfilled. In that regard, the documents on the case file show that, by an email dated 4 April 2012, the Commission had proposed to the exporting producers included in the sample three periods for verification visits at their premises, which were 2 to 4 May 2012, 7 to 9 May 2012 and 9 to 11 May 2012 respectively. It is appropriate, moreover, to observe that those three periods were all relatively near to the date on which the period for adopting a MET decision would expire, namely, at the latest, 17 May 2012. Thus, the institutions do not prove, or even contend, that the Commission exercised all due diligence in proposing periods for the verification visits allowing it a sufficient margin of manoeuvre in order to adopt a MET decision before the abovementioned time limit expired. In addition, the fact that the three exporting producers included in the sample were available only in one of the three periods proposed by the Commission is manifestly not, in the present case, an abnormal and unforeseeable circumstance.