EU Court of Justice: ‘Poland must pay 320 million euros’

Brussels –Poland must pay, and the European Commission was right to recover over 320 million euros in fines imposed on the country, which cannot get a discount. The General Court of the European Union once again condemns the (old) Warsaw government for its justice reform contrary to EU rules, dismissing an appeal seeking to annul the EU executive’s levy against the Polish treasury. A burden that the previous PiS government left to be paid by Donald Tusk’s new government. “In recovering the amounts payable, the Commission did not infringe EU law,” the Luxembourg judges argued.

In 2021, the European Court of Justice ordered Poland to pay one million euros a day – a fine then reduced in 2023- for reforming the judiciary. The European Commission only implemented the ruling of the Court.

Poland points out that to comply with the Court’s order and bring itself into compliance, it adopted, on June 9, 2022, an amending law that changed national legislation. As a result, Warsaw reasons, there would be conditions for the annulment, in total, of six set-off decisions covering the period between July 15, 2022, and June 4, 2023, i.e., between the entry into force of the law of June 9, 2022, and the ruling that halved the amount of the penalty. The six contested decisions are worth 320.2 million euros recovered by the EU.

The EU Court, on the one hand, recalls that as long as the amount of the daily penalty set in the October 27, 2021 order remained unchanged — that is, until April 21, 2023 — and as long as Poland did not fully comply with its obligations, “the Commission was obliged to ensure recovery of that amount in full.” Furthermore, it clarified that the reduction of the daily penalty granted by the Court of Justice on April 21, 2023, “had effect only for the future.” Therefore, it only covered amounts from that date. For this reason, Poland must pay approximately 320.2 million euros as a penalty imposed by the Court of Justice in the infringement proceedings.