EUROPEAN COMMISSION
Competition DG
The Director General
Brussels, 2021-11-23
COMP/B4/6211
Francesca Ciccul i
Investigative Reporting Project Italy
Viale Giulio Cesare, 92
00192 ROMA
By e-mail: ask+request-10172-
xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx
Dear Madam,
Subject:
Your applications for access to documents – Ref GestDem No 2021/6010,
2021/6056, 2021/6416, 2021/6441, 2021/6682
We refer to your messages registered on October and November 2021 under the above-mentioned
reference numbers.
In your messages, you request access to lists of meetings between different entities and the
Directorate-General for Competition, including any Cabinet Members and/or officials, during
which several topics mentioned in your messages (including “hydrogen vehicles”, electric
vehicles”, “bat eries”, “hydrogen” and/or “lithium”) were discussed. According to your
messages, the lists should include: date, individuals attending and organisational affiliation, as
wel as the issues discussed; al minutes and other reports of these meetings and/or calls; all
documents prepared for the purpose of the meetings issued both in preparation and after the
meetings took place; al correspondence, including attachments between the Directorate-General
for Competition and the entities in question, including any Cabinet Members and/or officials, and
any lobby group and/or industry representative discussing the same topics.
As specified in Article 2(3) of Regulation 1049/2001, the right of access as defined in that
regulation applies only to existing documents in the possession of the institution.
The preparation of a list of documents would require searching in the various databases of the
Commission. In this regard, I would like to point out that the question regarding the possible status
of information stored in databases as a document within the meaning of Regulation 1049/2001 has
already been subject to an assessment by the General Court, which in its ruling in Case T-214/13
established that ‘in the event of an application for access designed to have the Commission carry out
a search of one or more of its databases using search criteria specified by the applicant, the
Commission is obliged, subject to the possible application of Article 4 of Regulation No 1049/2001,
to accede to that request, if the requisite search can be carried out using the search tools which it has
available for the database in question’.
With this judgement, the General Court confirmed the previous judgment in the Dufour case, where
the Court stated that ‘anything that can be extracted from a database by means of a normal or routine
search may be the subject of an application for access’.
Furthermore, I would like to bring to your at ention the most recent judgement in Case C-491/15P,
where the Court took the position that the routine character of an operation which determines
whether information extracted from a database is a document, is determined by whether the
operation has been made available to final users for general use.
The information requested by you is possibly stored in the various databases of the Commission
used for storing documents and cannot be extracted from the relevant database by means of a routine
search operation using the search tools available. We would like to add that we also do not have any
tools to easily produce such kind of lists.
Given that no such lists of documents, corresponding to the description given in your
applications, are held by the services of DG Competition, DG Competition is not in a position to
fulfil your request in this regard.
Please note that due to the wide scope of your requests, covering also areas fal ing under the
responsibility of other Directorates-General, parts of your requests have been at ributed to other
Directorates-General. This reply relates only to the documents of DG Competition. You will receive
the replies from the other respective Directorates-General in due course.
In accordance with Article 7(2) of Regulation 1049/2001, you are entitled to make a confirmatory
application requesting the Commission to review this position.
Such a confirmatory application should be addressed within 15 working days upon receipt of this
let er to the Secretary-General of the Commission at the following address:
European Commission
Secretary-General
Transparency, Document Management & Access to Documents (SG.C.1)
BERL 7/076
B-1049 Bruxel es or by email to: xxxxxxxxxx@xx.xxxxxx.xx
Yours faithfully,
(e-signed)
Olivier GUERSENT
