Judgment_paragraph 73 · HF v European Parliament (C-570/18 P)

73In the present case, as is apparent from paragraph 69 above, the fact that the appellant was not given, at the very least, an anonymised summary of the statements of the various witnesses and was not heard on the subject of those statements, with the effect that she was not put in a position effectively to submit observations on their content before the Director-General for Personnel took the decision at issue, which adversely affected her, amounts to a breach of Article 41 of the Charter. As the Advocate General observed in points 121 to 123 of his Opinion, that failure as regards disclosure constitutes an irregularity that inevitably affected both the opinion of the Advisory Committee and the decision at issue. If the appellant had been given the opportunity to be properly heard, she might have persuaded the Director-General for Personnel that a different assessment of the facts and of the various contextual factors, which were decisive in that decision, was possible and that a different weight should be applied to them.