The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry

16 Fourth, the measure has to comply with the requirement of necessity. From the viewpoint of the Commission, this condition is met when the aid is limited to the amount necessary to reach its objective. This is why the Commission has introduced and applies certain caps for the measures under Article 107(3)(b). 53 Moreover, these measures always have to be limited in time. The Commission sometimes allows these measures only for a couple of months or a year to be granted as it is better to re-evaluate the situation in the near future than to allow unjustified State intervention. The Commission collects data about the schemes under Article 107(3)(b) on a regular basis. This allows the Commission to update its approach, see the dynamics in aid granting (the amounts already used compared to the notified budgets), fine-tune the rules, or prolong them, as it may be necessary. 5. Adapting State Aid Rules to the Crisis: Creation and Evolution of the Temporary Framework The first specifically coronavirus related Commission decision in the field of State aid was issued on 12 March 2020, when the Commission authorised a Danish scheme (case number: SA.56685) 54 under Article 107(2)(b) TFEU for the compensation of organisers of large public events. The Danish authorities issued an official recommendation on 6 March 2020 to cancel larger public events and events targeted at groups perceived as the most vulnerable to the COVID-19 disease, and intended to compensate the organisers of these events for the administrative cancellations. The Danish scheme was notified and approved on 11 March 2020 and adopted the next day (presumably, the Danish authorities contacted the Commission services some time before the official notification date, but it was a clear sign that the Commission was willing to act rapidly in the circumstances). Another significance of this ice-breaker decision was that it recognized the coronavirus situation as a whole as an “exceptional occurrence” (an unforeseeable, extraordinary event and 53 See Chapter 5 on the Temporary Framework. 54 Commission Decision C(2020) 1698 final of 13 March 2020 (SA.56685 (2020/N) – DK – Compensation scheme for cancellation of events related to COVID-19)