Case C-861/26 P, Lagardère v Commission – search your own house and hand us what you find
A dawn raid is conducted by inspectors, under rules that say what they may take. A request for information is answered by the company itself. Lagardère’s appeal is about what happens when the second is used to achieve the first.
Facts
In the course of its examination of the Vivendi/Lagardère concentration (Case M.11184), the Commission adopted Decision C(2023) 6429 of 19 September 2023 under Article 11(3) of Regulation (EC) No 139/2004, later amended twice, requiring Lagardère to produce information. Article 11(1) allows the Commission to “require … undertakings and associations of undertakings to provide all necessary information”, and Article 11(3) lets it do so by decision. What the decision demanded, on Lagardère’s account, was that the company collect its employees’ personal communication devices, together with some of their content and their personal documents stored on work devices, search them against the Commission’s criteria and hand over the results. Lagardère, whose group publishes newspapers and magazines, also invokes the protection of journalistic sources. By judgment of 3 June 2026 in Case T‑1119/23 (ECLI:EU:T:2026:356) the General Court (Ninth Chamber, extended composition) dismissed the action. Lagardère appeals on six grounds, and asks the Court, before ruling, to order the Commission to produce everything on which it considered it had sufficiently strong evidence to adopt the decision.
Grounds of Appeal
In support of its appeal, the appellant raises six grounds of appeal.
— The General Court erred in law and in its legal classification of the facts by failing to annul the decision at issue, when the latter is based on a misuse of the powers which the Commission holds under Article 11(3) of Regulation No 139/2004. The decision at issue in fact unlawfully delegated to Lagardère the burden of conducting exploratory ‘searches’ without also satisfying itself that the latter had the legal and technical capacity to carry out those searches with regard to its own shareholders and employees who have their own personal rights;
— The judgment under appeal is vitiated by an error of law, failure to state reasons, distortion of the pleas raised by Lagardère, and an infringement of the right to effective judicial protection, in that that judgment fails to characterise and criticise the failure to state reasons for the decision at issue;
— The judgment under appeal is vitiated by an error of law and a failure to state reasons in its assessment of the infringement of the right to respect for private life to which the decision at issue gives rise, when the latter required that the appellant collect the personal communication tools of its employees and some of the content of those tools, along with their personal documents saved on their professional tools;
— The General Court erred in law and in its legal classification of the facts by failing to penalise the infringement, caused by the decision at issue, to the fundamental principle of protection of journalistic sources, and by finding part of the complaints raised by Lagardère to be inadmissible on grounds of distortion of the purpose and effects of the Commission’s decision of 24 January 2024;
— The General Court erred in law and in its legal classification of the facts by failing to characterise the infringement of the principle of legal certainty to which the decision at issue gave rise, in that it was not sufficiently ‘clear and precise’ and necessarily put Lagardère in breach of its legal and contractual obligations;
— The General Court erred in law and unduly reversed the burden of proof by failing to sanction the infringement of the principle of proportionality and the principle of protection against arbitrary intervention by public authorities within the sphere of private activities to which the decision at issue gives rise, in that it went beyond what is necessary to achieve the objective pursued by the Commission’s investigation.
Sources
OJ notice C/2026/4871 (EUR‑Lex) · Case file on CURIA · Judgment under appeal, T‑1119/23 (ECLI:EU:T:2026:356) · Regulation (EC) No 139/2004
Comment
The first ground states the structural complaint and the rest follow from it. An inspection under the merger regulation is carried out by Commission officials, on the undertaking’s premises, within limits the Court has spent decades defining. A request for information under Article 11 is answered by the undertaking, which decides what falls within the request — and the Commission has no duty to confine itself to what an inspector could have taken. Lagardère’s argument is that by requiring it to gather employees’ personal devices and search them, the Commission used the lighter instrument to obtain what the heavier one is regulated for, and put a private company in the position of conducting a search against its own staff. The words in the notice are precise: the decision “unlawfully delegated to Lagardère the burden of conducting exploratory ‘searches’”.
Two of the remaining grounds have an importance beyond merger control. The third concerns employees who are not parties to anything: their personal phones, their private messages, their own documents stored on work devices. They cannot challenge the decision — it is addressed to their employer — and the employer’s incentive is to comply rather than to litigate on their behalf. Whether Article 7 of the Charter constrains what a company may be ordered to extract from its workforce is a question the Court has approached from the inspection side but not from this one. The fifth ground makes the practical point: an order that is not “clear and precise” leaves the company choosing between under-producing, and risking a fine, and over-producing, and breaching its own obligations to its employees.
The fourth ground is the one that gives the case its public dimension. Lagardère’s group includes press titles, and the protection of journalistic sources is a principle the Union’s courts have recognised as a matter of fundamental rights, not merely of national press law. A production order broad enough to capture journalists’ communications does not become narrower because it was addressed to their employer in a merger investigation. How the Court handles the interaction between a competition procedure and source protection will be read well beyond this file — by every media group that is ever party to a concentration.
Readers may note the parallel with Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission (C‑496/23 P), where the complaint is that the Commission’s search terms under Article 18 of Regulation 1/2003 swept in irrelevant and personal material, and where the Advocate General has proposed dismissal. The two cases come from different regulations and different investigations, but they ask the same question: what limits apply when the Commission requires a company to find the evidence against itself.