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The report expressed concern about the excessive delay in recovering unauthorised State aid granted by several Member States and called on the Commission to increase the transparency and public accountability of the existing state aid mechanisms and to establish 'clear criteria' for measuring state aid levels. The Commission was also urged to ensure compatibility between state aid and cohesion policy by making sure that state aid does not result in distortion of competition through relocation of companies from one Member State to another, with the ensuing loss of jobs in one region for the benefit of another.
Recommendations made by the report included the need to apply competition law to all players on the European market, whether or not they have their headquarters in the EU, and to make effective the right of victims who have suffered losses as a result of anti-competitive behaviour to obtain compensation.
The report also “recalls the Commission’s commitment to reviewing the ‘two-thirds rule’ as a threshold for finding a Community impact in regard to merger proposals, and suggests that progress in this area and a more consistent approach in the evaluation of comparable merger operations would be welcome whenever decisions taken at national level could have a strong impact on the market structure of neighbouring Member States.”
Competition Policy 2005
All texts adopted on 19 June