Review of EU Case Law on State Aid - 2023: Part One: Notion of State Aid

This article reviews the highlights of the State aid case law of the General Court (GC) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) (together the EU Courts) in 2023. Largely following the structure of previous editions of this chronicle,1 the judgments are discussed in three main categories, being i) the notion of State aid, ii) the compatibility of State aid with the internal market, and iii) the State aid procedures. This article focuses on the first category, ie the notion of ‘State aid’ with in the meaning of Article 107(1) TFEU. A follow-up article ‘Review of EU Case Law on State aid–2023 - Part Two ’2 tackles compatibility and procedures. The topics are divided into multiple subcategories. Since parties often invoke multiple legal arguments before the EU Courts, some judgments are discussed in more than section.
An overview of the cases addressed in each section can be found in Table 1 (see Appendix).