Opinion of Mr Advocate General VerLoren van Themaat delivered on 14 December 1983

1 Translated from the Dutch.

2 So the importance of the Court's answer as regards other cases is confined to other actions relating to the period, to the question whether Member States have the power or the duty to recover any excessive amounts of refunds paid in that period and to the possible repercussions of the Court's answer on the clearance by the Commission of Member States' accounts for that period. On this last point I refer to the last sentence of the answer which the Commission gave to the Court's written questions ami the explanations it provided at the licăririi;. The two last points, which may be affected by the Court's answer to the second question, raise other legal issues, however, which arc not directly related to the questions raised in this case.

3 In a later telex message of 7 September 1981 that answer was clarified as follows: No export refunds within the meaning of the annex to Regulation (EEC) No 1928/81 may be granted on any carton of boned or boneless meat that contains thin flank and/or shin or shank or on any consignment of boned or boneless meat that contains thin flank and/or shin or shank. In a still later written answer to a question the following further clarification was given: Where the consignments consist of different cuts, export refunds may be paid on ... the cuts in cartons which do not contain any cuts comprising shin or shank. I should point out, however, that those official interpretations, which the Irish authorities (wrongly, according to the Court's decisions) assumed to be instructions, related to a question about a cut containing a whole shin. Even from a pure linguistic point of view, the answer concerns only cuts containing the (whole) shin or shank and/or the (whole) thin flank. The legal question therefore remains open where a cut contains only a small piece of thin flank.