Margaret Vestager was “prepared for defeat”. “The victory made me cry”The Competition Commissioner welcomed the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) in favour of the European Commission against Apple on Tuesday 10 September. Ireland has “He gave Apple illegal aid that this State must recover”The Court stated, specifying that this ruling is “definitive”Specifically, the Cupertino group must reimburse Dublin 13 billion euros for the undue tax advantages it benefited from between 2003 and 2014, which are in fact comparable to illegal state aid.
In this matter, the Dane, who after ten years in the Commission is due to leave office at the end of the year, played an important role in her legacy. During her first term in office, between 2014 and 2019, Margrethe Vestager launched a fierce fight against tax evasion by multinationals who benefited greatly from the accommodating tax regimes of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and even Ireland. Regardless of whether tax policy falls within national jurisdiction, “tax lady”The UN, as US President Donald Trump disparagingly renamed it, had launched numerous investigations into illegal state aid.
Since then, European justice has often proved him wrong. The American chain Starbucks, the car group Fiat, the French energy company Engie and the American online sales giant Amazon have all seen their decisions overturned by the Commission. The Apple affair, the most emblematic because of the amounts involved (13 billion euros), also seemed to have gotten off to a bad start. In 2020, the EU court, in which Apple and Ireland intervened, annulled the Commission’s 2016 decision at first instance.
judicial soap opera
In this context, Margrethe Vestager, who we knew to be so offensive, lost her pugnacity. During her second term, the Competition Commissioner abandoned her fight against tax advantages for multinationals, waiting for justice to be resolved. “In recent years, the Commission has been very reluctant to examine cases that deserve to be examined”says Benoit Le Bret, partner at Gide Loyrette Nouel law firm and specialist in Community law.
In November 2023, Margrethe Vestager regained hope when the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the EU, to whom the Commission had appealed, considered that in 2020 the court had “He made several legal errors” and asked for the Apple case to be retried on the merits. Tuesday’s ruling closes the eight-year legal drama and allows him to walk away with his head held high.
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