On 28th April 2016 the EU Court of Justice declared invalid the maximum annual amount of free allowances for greenhouse gas emissions determined by the Commission for the period 2013-2020.

The judgment is a consequence of the legal actions that a number of companies included in the scope of ETS brought before the courts in Italy, the Netherlands and Austria against the National Authorities entrusted with the allocation of GHG allowances. The subject of dispute was the calculation method applied to define the maximum annual amount of allowances.

As a consequence, the Cross Sectoral Correction Factor (CSCF) applied to preliminary allocations with Decision 2013/448/EU is not valid and shall be re-calculated on the basis of new data to be provided by the Member States; the maximum annual amount of allowances could be higher or lower than that thus far determined by the Commission.

The Commission is granted 10 months to establish a new amount, whereas the previous allocations of allowances cannot be called into question.

The full text of the judgment is available on the CURIA website http://curia.europa.eu/juris/celex.jsf?celex=62014CJ0191&lang1=it&type=TXT&ancre=