On SGEIs and Sausages
As Nico advertised announced yesterday, on September 30th the GCLC will be holding a major conference on the Reform of State Aid Rules on Services of General Economic Interest (SGEI) in Bruges.
The conference couldn´t be more timely, because last Friday the European Commission launched a public consultation on some proposed new texts regarding the application of State aid rules to SGEIs.
This reform is set to be one of the highlights of Commissioner Almunia´s tenure. The Commission has been working on this for some time, and we can provide you with some insights on how they have undertaken this work.
A famous quote by John Godfrey Saxe -often attributed to Otto von Bismarck- states that “law and sausage are two things you do not want to see being made.”
Sure you don´t? We´ll show you anyway 😉
In the case of sausages, they are basically made like this:
And if you want to see part of the process of how law is made, check out this first draft of the SGEIs package that was circulated amongst the European Commission´s services under the coordination of the Commission´s General Secretariat, and promoted by Commissioners Almunia, Andor and Barnier:
It includes some highlighted internal comments, my favourite being this one:
“[voir absolument son [Judge Lenaert´s] intervention postée sur youTube in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L52IhxqxUXo ]”
It´s good to know that European Commission officials share our (and CPI´s) taste for competition law videos.
Note: We received this some months ago because our addressess were included in a large mailing list (no kidding).
Chillin'Competition 
How delicate was the content of that movie on ytube ? 🙂 (deleted)
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22 September 2011 at 9:15 am