On 24 March 2021, the Court of Justice handed down its judgment in Joined Cases C‑870/19 e C‑871/19, Prefettura Ufficio territoriale del governo di Firenze v MI and TB, on the interpretation of Article 15(7) of Regulation (EEC) No 3821/85 as amended by Regulation (EC) No 561/2006. The requests have been made in two sets of proceedings between the Prefettura Ufficio territoriale del governo di Firenze (Government representative’s office at the Florence Prefecture; “Florence Prefecture”) and MI and TB, two road transport drivers, concerning a number of administrative penalties imposed on them for infringements of the rules on compliance with driving times and rest periods.

Following two roadside inspections, the competent national authorities imposed several administrative penalties on MI and TB for not having produced the record sheets of the tachograph installed in their vehicle relating to the current day and several of the previous 28 ones. Since both their actions were rejected in the first instance, MI and TB brought an appeal before the Tribunale di Firenze (District Court of Florence) which, after establishing that they had committed only a single infringement, reduced the order to the imposition of a single penalty.

Therefore, the Florence Prefecture brought an appeal against each of the two judgments before the Corte suprema di cassazione(Supreme Court of Cassation; the “referring court”) which, after joining the two proceedings, decided to stay them in light of the need to interpret the relevant European legislation and to ask the Court of Justice whether Article 15(7) of Regulation No 3821/85 and Article 19 of Regulation No 561/2006 must be interpreted as meaning that, should the driver of a road transport vehicle subject to an inspection fail to produce the record sheets of the recording equipment relating to several days of activity during the period covering the day of the inspection and the previous 28 days, the competent authorities of the Member State in which the inspection was carried out must impose on that driver a single penalty, for a single infringement, or rather several separate penalties for several separate infringements, the number of which corresponds to that of the missing record sheets.

According to the Court, Article 15(7)(a) of Regulation No 3821/85 establishes a single obligation with regard to the whole period covering the day of inspection and the previous 28 days, and not a number of separate obligations in respect of each of the days covered or each of the corresponding record sheets, so that its breach constitutes a single and instantaneous infringement consisting in the fact that it is impossible, for the driver concerned, to produce, at the time of the inspection, all or some of those 29 record sheets. That infringement, therefore, can give rise only to a single penalty which, in order to comply with the requirement of proportionality of the penalties imposed by Article 19(1) of Regulation No 561/2006, must be sufficiently adjustable according to the seriousness of the infringement.

Marco Stillo