On the 22nd and 23rd of November 2008, the Managing Authority of the Operational Programme “Digital Convergence” organized a two day seminar on state aid law. The Seminar took place at Nafplion and it was addressed exclusively to the personnel of the Managing Authority.
On the first day of the seminar general issues concerning the state aid law, were presented. More specifically, Mr. M. Kekelekis, Lecturer at the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht (EIPA), presented a review on the State Aid Policy, whereas Mrs. E. Sgouridou, Research Assistant of the Center of International and European Economic Law (CIEEL) and Member of the State Aids Unit, and Mrs. E. Mouameletzi, Research Director and Coordinator of the State Aids Unit, gave lectures on the notion of state aid and the state aid Control Procedure, respectively. Afterwards, Mr. M. Kekelekis articulated on the application of the balancing criterion at the process of evaluating state aid measures and Mrs. E. Mouameletzi spoke about the recovery of illegal state aids. The first day was concluded with the presentations of Mrs. E. Sgouridou and Mr. M. Kekelekis, concerning the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER) and the definition of the Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME), respectively. On the second day of the seminar more specific issues of state aids, were presented. The first presentation of the day was that of Mr. M. Kekelekis, who spoke about the new Community Framework on Research, Development and Innovation (RDI), the second one was that of Mrs. E. Sgouridou, concerning the new Regulation 1998/2006 on de minimis Aids and the third one was that of Mrs. E. Mouameletzi, referring to Services of General Economic Interest (SGEI). The seminar had a satisfying participation and the discussion that followed after the presentations was very interesting and clarified most of the participants’ questions.
