Apple cleared of unpaid taxes in Ireland

    Apple cleared of unpaid taxes in Ireland

    This Wednesday the EU Court of Justice in a long-awaited ruling in which it gave a baton to the European Commission and condemned that community technicians failed to prove that the legal arrangements used were a selective advantage to the company.

    The case goes back  to August 2016, when the European Commission ordered Ireland to recover up to 13 billion euros, plus interest, in taxes not paid by Apple  between the 2003 and the 2014. 




    The irregularities, according to Vestager, had been proven since 1991,  but since the Commission opened the file in 2013 and the rules allow us to go back only a decade, the calculations that add up to those 14.000 million euros are only from 2003. 

    The General Court, however, considers that the Commission erred in stating that the tax rulings with Apple Sales International (ASI) and Apple Operations Europe (AOE) had a "selective economic advantage" and that, therefore,  they involved covert illegal aid. 

    Likewise, it considers that the Commission has not demonstrated, in its subsidiary reasoning, "methodological errors in the contested tax rulings which would have led to a reduction in the attributable profits of ASI and AOE in Ireland". And although the General Court "deplores the incomplete and sometimes inconsistent nature of tax rulings, the defects identified by the Commission are not, in themselves, sufficient to demonstrate the existence of an advantage within the meaning of Article 107 (1) of the Treaty on the functioning of the EU. Nor is there sufficient evidence that the tax rulings "were the result of the discretion exercised by the Irish tax authorities".

    The ruling is from the EU Court, but  the Commission can appeal to the Court of Justice, the highest level.




    In one rare case, Tim Cook spoke out against these actions in particularly clear language: "It's all politics" and even addressed an open letter to the entire European Apple community. It seems he was right.




    In 2013 we published this article: How Apple, Yahoo and Google also use Ireland to avoid taxes

    add a comment of Apple cleared of unpaid taxes in Ireland
    Comment sent successfully! We will review it in the next few hours.