Rarely has a ruling of the EU’s General Court been as brutal a beating for the Commission as Wednesday’s nixing of a decision that had been hailed as a keystone in efforts to tax Big Tech and stop countries offering special deals to multinationals. The judges outright annulled the Commission’s 2016 decision, which would have forced Ireland to claim back a stately amount of €13 billion from Apple in back taxes, plus interest.
It’s a disaster for the Commission’s much-venerated competition department, which the court said “did not succeed in showing to the requisite legal standard” that Apple was granted an illegal advantage. It is perhaps even more of a disaster for its boss, Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, who built her whole EU career on being tough on tech giants. The Commission was defending a concept — labeling special tax deals as illegal subsidies — that triggered serious tension between the U.S. and the EU, but turned out to be incompatible with the EU’s own laws.
Szerző: Florian Elder