Apple suffers setback in fight against EU’s $14b tax order

LUXEMBOURG, Nov 09 (Reuters): An EU tribunal made legal errors when it ruled in favour of Apple over a 13-billion-euro ($14 billion) tax order and should review the case again, an adviser to Europe's top court said on Thursday, in a potential setback for the iPhone maker.
The tax case against Apple was part of EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager's crackdown against deals between multinationals and EU countries that regulators saw as unfair state aid. The European Commission in its 2016 decision said Apple benefited from two Irish tax rulings for more than two decades that artificially reduced its tax burden to as low as 0.005 per cent in 2014.
The European Union's General Court in 2020 upheld Apple's challenge, saying that regulators had not met the legal standard to show Apple had enjoyed an unfair advantage. But advocate General Giovanni Pitruzzella at the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) disagreed, saying CJEU judges should set aside the General Court ruling and refer the case back to the lower tribunal.
"The judgment of the General Court on 'tax rulings' adopted by Ireland in relation to Apple should be set aside," he said in a non-binding opinion.
He said the General Court committed a series of errors in law and had also failed "to assess correctly the substance and consequences of certain methodological errors that, according to the Commission decision, vitiated the tax rulings".