* The product may be placed on the market only if it complies with the provisions of all applicable directives and if the conformity assessment procedure has been carried out accordingly.
* If stipulated in the directive(s), an authorized third party (Notified Body) must be involved in the conformity assessment procedure.
I'm not sure if the machine directive stipulates it, but "authorized third party" seems to imply that the manufacturer can't perform the certification themselves.
Even if you can count yourself as the approving company, did you make sure that your product complies with all the provisions? Or were you taking advantage of some loophole somewhere to skip the entire process?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking
EDIT: I see that you mentioned this was 15 years ago, so I'm mostly curious for historical reasons.