Recital 5

(5) For the sake of legal certainty, and in order to reduce administrative burden, this Regulation should provide a clear and exhaustive list of criteria for determining when two or more enterprises in the same Member State should be considered as a single undertaking. The Commission has selected criteria that are appropriate for the purposes of this Regulation from the well-established criteria for defining ‘linked enterprises’ as part of the definition of small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC (9) and in Annex I to Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014 (10). The criteria should be applicable, given the scope of this Regulation, to both SMEs and large undertakings and should ensure that a group of linked enterprises is considered as one single undertaking for the application of the de minimis rule. However, enterprises that have no relationship with each other, except for the fact that each of them has a direct link to the same public body or bodies, should not be treated as being linked to each other. The specific situation of enterprises controlled by the same public body or bodies, in which the enterprises may have independent power of decision, should therefore be taken into account.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-06 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.