The task of European competition policy is not to relieve the EU budget.
This finding, which is actually trivial, should be remembered because the EU Commission sometimes justifies the cartel fines it has imposed by saying that the fines – now often amounting to billions – would benefit European taxpayers.
It's true: every euro fine that a company exposed as a cartel offender has to pay to the EU reduces the extent of the member states' contributions to the EU budget.
But any diligent justification of cartel fines with budgetary considerations is out of the question.
Fines punish anti-competitive behavior and ideally ensure that potential cartel members no longer sin in the future.
The hoped-for deterrent is the main reason for the fines.
So if the Commission wants to remain credible as a competition authority, it should avoid any appearance that it wants to restructure the budget with high antitrust fines.
Of course, this also applies the other way around: there is no point in complaining about budget gaps that result from the fact that the Commission loses its cartel cases in court and therefore has to pay back high cartel fines.
But that doesn't change the justified criticism of the Commission.
In the past few years, the EU competition authorities have simply been too often attested in court that they were wrong.
Sometimes it was incorrect assessments of the facts, sometimes incorrect economic impact assessments, sometimes procedural or legal errors, which caused the Commission decisions in Luxembourg to be invalid.
The judges overturned tax-aid decisions at Apple and Amazon, and they threw out large fines against Intel and Qualcomm in abuse cases.
In all these cases the Commission was not diligent enough.
Eliminating that would be the task of Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.
It is doubtful that she can do this: