The European Commission has adopted a Regulation exempting small subsidies from the obligation to notify them in advance for clearance by the Commission under EC Treaty state aid rules. Under the new Regulation, aid of up to €200,000, granted over any period of three years will not be considered as state aid. Loan guarantees will also be covered to the extent that the guaranteed part of the loan does not exceed €1.5 million. In order to avoid abuses, forms of aid for which the inherent aid amount cannot be calculated precisely in advance (so-called 'non-transparent' aids) and aid to firms in difficulty have been excluded from the Regulation. The Regulation takes account of comments received from a series of public consultations in the course of 2006. It constitutes one of the cornerstones of the State Aid Action Plan (see IP/05/680 and MEMO/05/195), designed to simplify the state aid rules, to refine the economic analysis of subsidies and to allow the Commission to concentrate its enforcement on the most distortive cases. The Regulation will be published in the Official Journal before the end of 2006 and will enter into force on 1 January 2007.
IP/06/1765
Brussels, 12th December 2006
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