Case C-162/12, Airport Shuttle Express – municipal restrictions on chauffeur-driven hire-cars [judgment 2014, ECLI:EU:C:2014:74]
Do the EU’s laws on the freedom to provide services and competition override Italian laws governing where a transport company’s head office and garaging is located, and aspects of the journeys undertaken by chauffeur-driven hire-cars?
Facts
Giovanni Panarisi had a licence from a municipality to run a ‘car and driver hire’ business. The licence terms complied with Italian statutory laws, and included terms governing the location of the garaging, and the requirement that a journey undertaken by car and driver hire should start and finish at the garage.
In accordance with a 1992 Italian law, Panarisi assigned his licence and control over the vehicle to Airport Shuttle Express, a company based in Rome. Since the garaging was no longer taking place in the municipality which had granted him the licence, the municipality decided to suspend that licence for 30 days.
The claimants claimed that ‘car and driver hire’ was an unregulated public service. Member States were obliged under Article 90 TFEU to have a transport policy organised on the basis of an internal market and thus characterised by the free movement of goods, people, services and capital and a system of competition. They submitted that a raft of Italian statutory measures infringed Articles 26, 49 and 54 TFEU. For example, companies from the smaller local authorities surrounding Rome could only take customers starting their journey from somewhere inside those local authorities; the companies could not take customers which wished to start their journey from inside the local authority of Rome. To bolster their claims, the claimants pointed out that the EU Commission had asked the Italian authorities to provide information about how those provisions of Italian law complied with EU case law. The claimants also referred to a decision of the Italian competition authority in which it had expressed its concern that these territorial restrictions could seriously disturb competition; indeed, the authority was so concerned that it had recommended the Italian legislature take corrective measures. The Administrative District Court of Lazio did not know how to apply EU law.
Questions Referred
According to the Curia website, the Administrative District Court of Lazio asked:
Do Article 49 TFEU, Article 3 TEU, Articles 3, 4, 5 and 6 TFEU, Articles 101 and 102 TFEU and Regulation (EEC) No 2454/1992 and Regulation (EC) No 12/1998 preclude the application of Articles 3(3) and 11 of Law No 21 of 1992 in so far as the latter provisions respectively state that ’3. The registered office of the carrier, and the garage, must be located, exclusively, within the territory of the municipality which issued the authorisation’ and that ‘… Bookings of car and driver hire shall take place at the garage. Each individual car and driver hire must begin and end at the garage located in the municipality where the authorisation was issued, returning to that garage, although the collection of the user and the user’s arrival at his destination may take place also in other municipalities …’?
Do Article 49 TFEU, Article 3 TEU, Articles 3, 4, 5 and 6 TFEU, Articles 101 and 102 TFEU and Regulation (EEC) No 2454/1992 and Regulation (EC) No 12/1998 preclude the application of Articles 5 and 10 of Lazio Regional Law No 58 of 26 October 1993, in so far as the latter provisions respectively state that ‘… Users shall be collected, or the service shall begin, within the territory of the municipality which issued the authorisation’ and that ‘… Users shall be collected and the service shall begin exclusively within the territory of the municipality which issued the licence or authorisation and the service shall be provided to any destination, subject to the consent of the driver in the case of destinations beyond the municipal boundaries …’?
Outcome. By judgment of 13 February 2014 (ECLI:EU:C:2014:74) the Court ruled, in the words of the operative part: “The Court of Justice of the European Union does not have jurisdiction to answer the requests from the Tribunale amministrativo regionale per il Lazio (Italy) for a preliminary ruling, made by decisions of 19 October 2011 and 1 December 2011 in Joined Cases C‑162/12 and C‑163/12, to the extent that those requests concern the interpretation of Article 49 TFEU. …” The full text is available on EUR-Lex and CURIA.
Comment
The Administrative District Court of Lazio has asked a further question of the CJEU in a related dispute, Case C-419/12, Crono Service – Italian chauffeur-driven hire-cars, cartels and the freedom to provide services.
Airport Shuttle Express is one of three Italian cases involving national laws that regulate the services supplied by people, and whether those laws are compatible with the EU’s ‘market’ laws regulating cartels and the freedom to provide services.
A second case, Consiglio Nazionale dei Geologi is about a professional body’s guidelines for determining the pay of geologists and whether those rules infringe cartel law. And a third case, Venturini, concerns whether a professional running a new type of pharmacy can sell specific pharma goods which the state has in effect reserved for sale only in a traditional pharmacy.
Will the CJEU’s judgments come to erode the professions? Will they change the current relationships between the private power of professions and the public power of the state? And would creating more competition and facilitating the rise of alternative business structures result in the delivery of equivalent services to a consumer for a lower price?