Rejection of Commission appeal in the Tercas case

Question for written answer  E-001305/2021
to the Commission
Rule 138
Marco Zanni (ID), Francesca Donato (ID), Valentino Grant (ID), Antonio Maria Rinaldi (ID)

On 2 March 2021, the Court of Justice of the EU dismissed the Commission’s appeal against the judgment of 19 March 2019 of the General Court of the EU, which had annulled the decision to regard as ‘irregular State aid’ the intervention put in place in 2014 by Italy’s Interbank Deposit Protection Fund (the FITD) to rescue Tercas.

The misapplication of the state aid rules to the intervention by the FITD made it necessary, in similar cases, to adopt solutions that were more burdensome for savers and creditors. In the present case, as the Bank of Italy explains¹, ‘If the FITD’s intervention had not been considered as State aid, the rescue operation for the four banks (subsequently subjected to burden sharing: Etruria, CariChieti, CariFerrara and Marche) by this fund would not have sacrificed the rights of subordinated creditors and the rescue would have assessed the banks’ bad debts at book value’. As a result, different solutions could have been adopted, without involving small shareholders and bond holders, even in the case of the crisis management of the banks in the Veneto region.

Can the Commission:

• 1.identify the reasons which led it to regard FITD intervention as irregular State aid;
• 2.clarify how and when it intends to answer for the damage unfairly caused to the savers and banks directly and indirectly affected by this erroneous decision?

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¹ https://www.bancaditalia.it/media/approfondimenti/2016/d-e-r-quattro-banche/index.html