EU’s Vestager Loses Another Case
In what I consider welcome news, Amazon Delivers Another Big-Tech Tax Defeat to EU’s Vestager
Amazon.com Inc. won its bid to topple a 250 million-euro ($303 million) tax bill in another blow to European Union competition chief Margrethe Vestager’s crackdown on preferential fiscal deals.
Regulators failed to show that the U.S. online retailer was given special treatment by Luxembourg’s tax authority in violation of state-aid rules, the EU General Court ruled on Wednesday.
Amazon’s victory follows last year’s landmark court defeat for the EU commissioner against Apple Inc., which contested a record 13 billion-euro tax order. The tech giants were both targeted as part of Vestager’s eight-year crusade against allegedly unfair treatment doled out by EU nations such as Luxembourg, Ireland and the Netherlands to attract some of the world’s leading firms.
The European Commission “did not prove to the requisite legal standard that there was an undue reduction of the tax burden of a European subsidiary of the Amazon group,” the Luxembourg-based EU judges said.
Vestager Won’t Give Up
Ensuring all companies pay a fair share of tax is a marathon not a sprint. We’ll analyse today’s judgments. Both confirm State aid rules apply & selective tax benefits harm fair competition. So we keep working, also to seize momentum to update our tax laws https://t.co/ngSomXSJN0
— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) May 12, 2021
Small Money, Big Idea
The amount of money in this case is small, nearly irrelevant to Amazon.
But if Vestager wins one of these cases against big US technology firms, the fines and the demands will never stop until the companies are forced to break into pieces.
Mish
