Apple suffers setback in EU clash over $14 billion tax bill

Apple won an initial bid to topple the EU’s decision in 2020 after judges found the European Commission had made several errors.

Apple Inc. and Ireland suffered a setback in their clash with the European Union’s antitrust watchdog over a €13 billion ($14 billion) Irish tax bill that formed the centerpiece of an EU crackdown on special fiscal deals doled out to some of the world’s most powerful companies.

Advocate General Giovanni Pitruzzella of the EU Court of Justice in an advisory opinion on Thursday said Apple’s win in a lower EU court should be re-examined. The top EU tribunal is set to issue its binding ruling in the coming months.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager — who’s on temporary leave to pursue a bid for the presidency of the European Investment Bank — sparked outrage from the iphone maker’s Cupertino, California headquarters to the White House when in 2016 she chose to home in on the company’s tax arrangements in Ireland. It’s by far the biggest case in Vestager’s decade-long campaign for tax fairness which has also targeted the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and carmaker Stellantis NV’s Fiat.

Apple won an initial bid to topple the EU’s decision in 2020 after judges found the European Commission had made several errors. The defeat was a crushing blow for Vestager, who’s suffered several more losses in other tax cases after judges faulted her team’s findings that Ireland and Luxembourg had given the firms an unfair tax advantage.

Still, the EU courts have at least upheld the commission’s novel route to using state-aid rules to question companies’ arrangements with member states. The EU move also helped fuel a bloc-wide push to close tax loopholes that allowed some multinational companies to legally pay less tax in Europe.

The case is: C-465/20 P, Commission v. Ireland and Others.