EU antitrust bureaucrats have claimed a court made legal errors when it scrapped their 13 billion euro ($15.7 billion) Apple tax grab in Ireland, in a filing to have the verdict overturned.
The Commission is appealing to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union following a ruling last year by the General Court, which said the EU executive had not met the requisite legal standard to show Apple had enjoyed an unfair advantage.
“The General Court’s failure to properly consider the structure and content of the decision and the explanations in the Commission’s written submissions on the functions performed by the head offices and the Irish branches is a breach of procedure,” the Commission said in a filing in the Official Journal. The EU competition enforcer added: “The General Court’s subsequent acknowledgement… that the decision examines the functions performed by the Irish branches in justifying the attribution of the Apple IP licences to them constitutes contradictory reasoning, which amounts to a failure to state reasons.”
Apple has said the General Court judgment proved it has always complied with Irish laws, with the issue more about where it should pay taxes rather than the amount.
MacDailyNews Take: The EU will lose in its attempt to save face by appealing a case it failed to prove in the first place. This $15.7 billion Apple tax verdict should not be overturned.
A company’s business success, regardless of degree, doesn’t mean some quasi-governmental political confederation headed by a dingbat gets to retroactively grab whatever sum they want. – MacDailyNews, July 15, 2020
Is Ireland its own country or merely a vassal state to a quasi-governmental political confederation that’s already been hit with one very significant defection?
The EU’s retroactive tax grab is a farce. — MacDailyNews, October 4, 2017
I think that Apple was targeted here. And I think that (anti-US sentiment) is one reason why we could have been targeted. People in leadership positions in several countries tell me that this is the agenda. I don’t know where that comes from. But what I feel strongly about is that this decision was politically based, of that I’m very confident. There is no reason for it in fact or in law… At a worldwide level, Apple pays income tax of 26.1 percent… I’d be the first to say that the tax system needs to be reformed and that it should be made simple and straightforward. But it should be talked about going forward, not in a way that retrofits the law to what others wish it was. It’s patently unfair and not what you expect from a developed country that has a history of rule and law. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, September 1, 2016