CJEU case C-807/21 Deutsche Wohnen – CJEU Judgment (Germany, 2023)

DW is a listed real estate company and indirectly holds around 163,000 housing units and 3,000 commercial units. The owners of these units are subsidiaries (holding companies) of DW and lease the units to other companies in the group (service companies). DW is only in charge or the central management. DW and the group of companies which it manages process the personal data of the tenants of said units. In 2017, the Berlin DPA informed DW during an on-the-spot inspection that companies within its group were storing personal data in a potentially infringent filing system. The DPA could not tell if it the storage was necessary nor if there were safeguards to ensure the erasure of data which was no longer required. DW told the DPA that it would move data to a more compliant database but this never materialised in practice. In 2019, the DPA fined DW €14,385,000 for intentional infringement of Article 5(1)(a), (c) and (e) and of Article 25(1) GDPR. The DPA found that DW intentionally failed to take the measures needed to allow personal data relating to tenants to be regularly erased or to check whether they had erroneously been stored. It also stated that DW had continued to store the personal data of at least 15 named tenants where such storage was not necessary. DW appealed this decision to Berlin's Regional Court. The court stated that the imposition of a fine on a legal person is regulated by national law (Paragraph 30 of the OWiG).The Act on Regulatory Offences: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_owig/index.html As a requirement for the imposition of the administrative fine against a legal person, German law requires that the original infringement shall be attributed to a natural person that is responsible for the legal person's compliance with the law. The Public Prosecutor's Office in Berlin filed an appeal with Berlin's Higher Regional Court. The Court observed that the limited liability regime of legal persons under national law is incompatible with