In this talk, Marco Botta will analyze the impact of the financial crisis on the decision-making and content of state aid control. The urgency and the extraordinary size of the subsidies committed by member states to save national banks in 2008 let the Commission modify its ordinary decision-making practices and adopt a new set of soft laws, which represented an important change in the goals of this sub-policy in comparison to the pre-crisis period. Once the urgency of the crisis disappeared in mid-2009, the Commission returned to its ordinary decision-making and forced the financial institutions to be restructured, as under the pre-crisis rules. Therefore, by accommodating the initial requests of the member states which demanded the Commission to "speed-up" its review approach and to enforce state aid rules in a more lenient way, the Commission managed to safeguard its exclusive competence in state aid control.
Marco Botta has worked for five years as assistant professor at the Institute for European Integration Research of the University of Vienna (Austria). He has taught a number of courses related to European integration issues both in the Social Sciences and in the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna. Botta is also a research fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) of the European University Institute (EUI), Florence (Italy). He holds a Bachelor Degree in International Relations from the University of Turin (Italy), LL.M. in European Business Law from Leiden University (the Netherlands), and PhD from EUI Law Department.