39However, an excessively succinct, vague and generic — and in some respects, ambiguous — statement of reasons does not fulfil the requirements of the obligation to state reasons laid down in Article 18(3) of Regulation No 1/2003 in order to justify a request for information which, as in the present case, occurred more than two years after the first inspections, and even though the Commission had already sent a number of requests for information to undertakings suspected of involvement in an infringement and several months after the decision to initiate proceedings. Given those factors, it must be stated that the decision at issue was adopted at a time when the Commission already had information that would have allowed it to present more precisely the suspicions of infringement by the companies involved.
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