BRUSSELS: A top EU court has announced two major victories for Brussels by ruling against Google and Apple in separate legal cases with billions of euros at play. The verdicts give a boost to the EU’s outgoing competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, who had suffered a series of obstructions in EU courts against her decisions.
Apple
Closing a long-running sue, the European Court of Justice, ruled that the iPhone maker should pay 13 billion euros in back-taxes to Ireland. “The Court of Justice gives final verdict in the case and confirms the European Commission’s 2016 verdict: Ireland provided Apple illegal aid which Ireland is needed to recover,” the court announced.
Minutes later, the EU court upheld a 2.4-billion-euro fine against tech giant Google, one of a string of high-profile EU competition cases hitting the tech giant.
The court also dismissed an appeal by Google and Alphabet against the fine, slapped on the search engine in 2017 for abusing its dominant position by favoring its own comparison-shopping service.
One of the most bitter legal cases between the European Commission and the Apple case dates back to 2016 when the EU claimed Ireland permitted the iPhone maker to evade billions of euros in taxes.
By the commission’s calculations, Dublin permitted Apple to pay a tax rate of one percent of its European profits in 2003 which then declined to 0.005 percent by 2014.
It was one of several probes over the previous decade into sweetheart tax arrangements between several EU countries and major companies. The iPhone maker also gained the upper hand in the Ireland case in 2020, when the EU’s General Court annulled the order for it to pay the taxes owed – a verdict Brussels challenged.
The verdicts will offer relief for Brussels which has faced difficulty defending its tax enforcement actions in recent years, with previous cases lost against Starbucks and Amazon. The European Union fine against Google was one of several record penalties implemented for violating EU competition rules, totaling around 8 billion euros from 2017 to 2019.
