BRUSELAS, 9 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Advocate General of the European Union has proposed this Thursday that the ruling of the General Court of the EU that annulled the decision of the European Commission that demanded Apple return 13 billion euros plus interest in Ireland for having benefited from aid be reviewed. illegal prosecutors.
In 2016, Brussels considered that Apple’s companies in Ireland had received illegal state aid incompatible with the internal market, from which the Apple group as a whole had benefited, and urged the country to proceed with its recovery.
In 2020, at the request of Ireland and Apple, the General Court annulled the Commission’s decision, considering that it had not demonstrated the existence of an advantage derived from the adoption of advance tax decisions, after which Brussels asked the Court of Justice to annul the sentence.
Now, in his conclusions, the Advocate General has proposed to the Court of Justice that it annul the judgment and refer the matter back to the General Court so that it may decide again on the merits.
The opinion of the Advocate General is not binding on the CJEU, although the vast majority of the sentences handed down by the European High Court follow the line previously established by these opinions.
According to the Advocate General, the General Court committed a series of errors of law by finding that the Commission had not sufficiently demonstrated that the intellectual property licenses held by Apple’s companies in Ireland and the corresponding profits generated for sales of Apple products outside the United States, were to be attributed for tax purposes to the Irish branches.
Likewise, he considers that the General Court did not correctly assess the existence and consequences of certain methodological errors that, according to the Commission’s decision, vitiated advance tax decisions, and therefore the Advocate General considers it necessary to proceed to a new assessment of the affair.
