Openings of formal investigation under Court pressure

It has been a feature common to EU State aid control that complaints against alleged undue advantages of competitors have, quite regularly so, proven to be a dragging and tiresome business. In most cases the complaints got rejected at the very end of this process. Recently, some rays of hope seem to show up on the horizon. After the EU General Court, by its ruling of 19.9.2018, had first annulled the rejection of a complaint against the financing of the so-called Øresund Fixed Link (Case T-68/15), followed by another Court judgment annulling the rejection of a complaint against a UK Capacity Market scheme aiming to ensure security of electricity supplies (Case T-793/14), the Commission opened formal investigations in both cases on 28 February 2019 and 21 February 2019, respectively. According to insider information these two form the vanguard of a series of further cases in which complainants that got rebuffed in the administrative proceedings before the European Commission were successful in overturning the decisions by which they got rejected before the EU judicature.