Margrethe Vestager had “prepared for defeat”. “The victory made me cry”the Competition Commissioner rejoiced after the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) ruled in favour of the European Commission against Apple on Tuesday 10 September. Ireland has “granted Apple illegal aid that this State is required to recover”the Court said, specifying that this judgment is “definitive”In concrete terms, the Cupertino group must repay 13 billion euros to Dublin for undue tax advantages from which it benefited between 2003 and 2014, which are indeed tantamount to illegal state aid.
In this case, the Danish woman, who, after ten years at the Commission, must leave her post by the end of the year, was playing a large part of her legacy. During her first term, between 2014 and 2019, Msme Vestager had launched a fierce fight against tax evasion by multinationals that took full advantage of the accommodating tax regimes of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland. It does not matter that tax policy is a national matter, the “tax lady”as US President Donald Trump had contemptuously renamed it, had opened numerous investigations, judging that there was illegal state aid there.
Since then, the European courts have often ruled against him. The American coffee chain Starbucks, the automobile group Fiat, the French energy company Engie and the American online sales giant Amazon have all seen the Commission’s decisions against them annulled. The Apple case, the most emblematic due to the amounts at stake – 13 billion euros – also seemed to be off to a bad start. In 2020, the EU court, seized by the apple company and Ireland, had, at first instance, overturned the Commission’s 2016 decision.
Legal soap opera
In this context, Margrethe Vestager, who was known to be so aggressive, has lost some of her pugnacity. During her second term, the Competition Commissioner abandoned her fight against tax advantages for multinationals, while waiting for justice to be done. “In recent years, the Commission has been very reluctant to look at cases that deserve to be looked at”says Benoît Le Bret, partner at the firm Gide Loyrette Nouel and specialist in Community law.
In November 2023, Margrethe Vestager had regained hope when the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the EU, to whom the Commission had appealed, considered that in 2020 the court had “committed several errors of law” and requested that the Apple case be retried on the merits. Tuesday’s judgment brings the eight-year legal saga to a close and allows him to leave with his head held high.
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