Case C-419/12, Crono Service – Italian chauffeur-driven hire-cars, cartels and the freedom to provide services [judgment 2014, ECLI:EU:C:2014:81]

Where the conditions for a municipal licence for chauffeur-driven hire-cars stipulate that a licensee must not only have their registered office inside the municipality but also that the car and chauffeur must start and finish their service inside that municipality, then are either of these conditions compatible with EU competition law or the freedom to provide services?

Facts
Crono Service is the company listed first among the 111 others named as claimants in this action. The defendant is the Municipality of Roma Capitale. There is also an intervener, UGL Taxi [Unione Generale del Lavoro Taxi]. The intervener is supported in this action by 53 others comprising of the trade unions and professional associations that represent taxi drivers, plus individually-named taxi drivers, and co-operatives of chauffeur-driven cars and limousine services. The intervener favours the position of the Municipality of Roma Capitale.

The history of the dispute lies in a judicial review that seeks to annul a couple of the decisions taken in 2011 by two of Rome’s elected bodies: the Consiglio del Comune di Roma, and the Giunta del Comune di Roma. These decisions regulate the grant and distribution of licences allowing traffic onto the territory of the Municipality of Rome, and access to the areas of the city falling within the ZZTL (a zone of the city which is subject to special rules that are designed to restrict the volume of, and calm, the traffic circulating at the heart of Rome, and also further road safety and reduce the amount traffic pollution). The scope of the dispute has been widened to include two further decisions that have been taken by other public bodies in Rome. The first concerns the temporal effect of a permit for chauffeur-driven hire-cars; these are valid only until the 31 December of each year, and can be renewed for a further year. The second decision is that chauffeur-driven hire-car permit-holders, who are registered outside of Rome, need to pay a fee of 89 euro for each permit they hold.

Question Referred
According to the Curia website, the Question asked by the Administrative District Court of Lazio reads:

Do Article 49 TFEU, Article 3 TEU, Articles 3 TFEU, 4 TFEU, 5 TFEU, 6 TFEU, 101 TFEU and 102 TFEU preclude the application of Articles 3(3), 8(3) and 11 of Law No 21 of 1992 [on the carriage of passengers by public non-scheduled car and coach services] in so far as the latter provisions respectively provide that ‘[t]he registered office of the carrier, and the garage, must be located, exclusively, within the territory of the municipality which issued the authorisation’, that ‘[i]n order to obtain and maintain an authorisation for a car- and driver-hire service it is necessary to have the use, pursuant to a valid legal title, of a registered office, a garage or a vehicle rank located in the territory of the municipality which issued the authorisation’ and that ‘[b]ookings for car- and driver-hire services shall take place at the garage. Each individual car- and driver-hire service must begin and end at the garage located in the municipality in which 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’?