Apple risks a 13-14 billion euro hit due to the advantageous tax treatment he had obtained fromIreland and who for over 20 years have reduced the tax burden by up to 0,005%.
The Advocate General at the European Court of Justice, Giovanni Pitruzzella, former head of the Italian Antitrust, has in fact issued an opinion in which he suggests canceling a sentence which had in turn rejected a European Commission measure against two Ireland's "fiscal ruling" in favor of Apple.
Pitruzzella's opinion that it could cost Apple 14 billion euros
According to the lawyer, in fact, the case must be sent back to the Union Court (first instance body) which in turn will have to proceed with a new decision on the merits, because "he committed a series of legal errors" and also some methodological ones. The Court will rule in the coming months and typically aligns itself with four out of five of its advocates general's recommendations.
According to the Financial Times the match concerns an amount that exceeds 14 billion euros. “Tax rulings” are agreements that allow companies to obtain an advance decision from the tax administration on the tax treatment to which they will be subjected. In 1991 and 2007, Ireland issued two measures of this kind against two companies of the Apple group (Apple Sales International - ASI and Apple Operations Europe - Aoe), incorporated under Irish law, but not fiscally resident in Ireland .
The judicial affair
The legal case began in 2015, when Margrethe Vestager, then number one in the EU Antitrust, he started a battle against the benefits to multinationals granted by some European countries, guilty of distorting competition. In detail, the EU Commission considered "state aid” the advantages that Ireland attributed to the Cupertino company and ordered Dublin to recover approximately 13,1 billion euros in taxes.
This money (plus another 1,2 billion in interest) was recovered from Ireland in 2018, but two years later Apple took legal action. The The Union Court then annulled the decision of the Commission, considering that the existence of an advantage deriving from the tax breaks had not been proven.
It didn't end there: the Commission in turn appealed the sentence before the Court of Justice and, the last step so far, the Attorney General expressed his opinion in favor of Brussels.
