7/30/2023 0 Comments The teambizAt the time, then-commission president Jean-Claude Juncker was calling for the removal of single-country vetoes and a move to qualified majority voting on some policymaking areas related to taxation. The heyday of this approach was in the commission’s last term of 2014 to 2019, when Vestager was first appointed to lead the competition file. It was a novel approach that was not without its critics, who saw this as an indirect way to attack low-tax jurisdictions within the single market, with the backing of the larger countries who felt these arrangements were conning them out of their rightful tax intake. She argued that such deals gave unfair advantages within the single market, and could therefore be challenged under EU competition rules. These were all landmark, high-profile cases that some described as a pan-European crusade by the commission against perceived sweetheart tax deals for multinationals, with competition chief Margrethe Vestager at its head. Ireland showed up once again to offer support when the commission ordered a Fiat Chrysler subsidiary to pay Luxembourg an additional €30 million to rectify aggressive tax planning, and once more to back the Netherlands when they refused a commission order for Starbucks to pay them an extra €25.7 million in tax. When Luxembourg challenged an order by the commission that Amazon should pay it €250 million in back taxes due to a tax arrangement it said amounted to illegal state aid, Ireland was there to argue in support of the Grand Duchy. “It’s national law that is critical, not what the commission would like national law to be,” as Apple’s senior counsel Daniel Beard put it. On Tuesday, he accused the executive of seeking to “interpose OECD principles into Irish tax law”.Īpple also argued that the commission had relied on principles of international taxation and disregarding Irish tax law. Back in 2018, he argued in a similar case involving Luxembourg that the commission was engaged in an illegitimate attempt to expand its powers by trying to harmonise EU tax rates through the use of state aid rules. Ireland’s old warhorse is former attorney general Paul Gallagher.
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