(Adds that decision made to approve rail subsidies from truck tolls in paragraph 2)
By Lisa Jucca
BRUSSELS, July 23 (Reuters) - The European Commission said on Wednesday it had opened a state aid probe into Germany's plan to compensate its truck drivers for money they will pay under a future toll system.
The probe was launched as the Commission approved an EU-wide scheme to use road tolls on lorries in environmentally sensitive areas to help pay for rail lines to reduce truck traffic.
"The Commission decided to further investigate the German plan to compensate road hauliers for the higher financial burden resulting from the future increase of the new toll weights by implementing a compensation measure with an overall budget of 600 million euros per year," a Commission statement said.
The EU executive said it was concerned that any aid such as reduced excise duties for German hauliers would be unfair to competing firms from elsewhere in the European Union.
It said it could not exclude the possibility that the compensation measures constituted illicit state aid under EU competition rules and asked the German government for further information.
Germany is planning to introduce a new toll scheme for commercial vehicles on August 31. Haulage firms are concerned it will cost them an additional 150 euros to cross Germany, which is a key transit route for freight in the 15-nation EU.
Industry groups had pushed the Commission to investigate whether Berlin was breaking EU laws that say countries cannot charge excessive tolls that would harm trade and also to look at plans to compensate German truckers.
"CROSS SUBSIDIES"
The proposal adopted on Wednesday would allow countries such as Austria to charge extra for trucks using its Alpine passes and tunnels to subsidise the building of alternative rail links with Italy through the scenic mountain region.
But green groups have criticised the move as insufficient because it limits such "cross subsidies" to environmentally sensitive areas, caps the amount that can be charged and applies only to truck tolls and not to cars.
Germany, the only large continental European country still not charging for the use of its roads, plans to introduce truck tolls on August 31 at a rate of at least 0.125 euros per kilometre - more for bigger and more polluting vehicles.
The Commission wanted Berlin to hold off in introducing its road toll system to allow it to examine its pan-EU toll scheme.
At present European Union countries can only levy charges that reflect the cost of building and maintaining highways and are not allowed to "cross-subsidise" by charging road users to pay for railways.
The change would be of particular interest to Austria, which lost an EU court case in 2000 for over-charging trucks to pay for a rail link through the Brenner pass.
The new proposals would make it possible to add 20 percent to truck tolls in areas like the Alps and the Pyrenees to subsidise rail links, the EU official told Reuters.
It would also allow countries to vary road tolls to ease congestion or to take into account noise pollution, for example by charging more at rush hours or along stretches of highway that are close to residential areas.
A German transport ministry spokesman said any counter-proposal from the Commission would come too late to affect the start date and insisted the government would also not yield to industry demands to delay the launch.
"The introduction of the toll on August 31 is contractually fixed," the spokesman said.
Germany, he said, would also not accept any EU insistence that it only use expected annual income of 1.7 billion euros, after operators' fees to build and maintain roads.
"We cannot accept any interference in national budgetary competence. Member states must be free to use the income as they wish," he said. (Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop in Berlin)