European Union – Freedom of establishment. The Court of Justice of the European Union gave a preliminary ruling, deciding that arts 49 and 56 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union should be interpreted as precluding a restrictive national provision, such as that at issue in the main proceedings, which required a licensee to transfer, free of charge, on the cessation of business as a result of the expiry of the final term of the licence, the rights to use tangible and intangible assets which he owned and which constituted his network for the management and collection of bets, in so far as that restriction went beyond what was necessary to attain the objective actually pursued by that provision, which was for the referring court to verify.