The European Commission has been forced to delay decisions on whether countries violated state aid rules by granting private tax rulings to Amazon, Apple, Fiat, and Starbucks, EU competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said May 5.
“We do not necessarily get the information that we ask for the first time, not necessarily the second time either. Therefore, we will not meet the first deadline that we set ourselves to be done by the end of second quarter,” Vestager said at at a hearing of the European Parliament.
The EU in June 2014 announced it opened probes into whether tax rulings granted to Apple in Ireland, Starbucks in the Netherlands, and Fiat in Luxembourg violate state aid. The Commission announced a similar investigation the following October into a ruling granted to Amazon by Luxembourg. According to Vestager, though, there are now five tax ruling cases open against four different Member States.
Vestager also said that the Commission is looking into whether it should open a state aid case against fast food giant McDonald’s.
German lawmaker, Michael Theurer, noted that it has been alleged by a collation of trade unions that McDonald’s is paying an effective tax rate of only .48 percent. “Every food business SME is paying higher rates of taxation; every cafe owner is paying higher rates of taxation,” he said.
In a February report, the trade unions and anti-poverty campaign group, War on Want, alleged that McDonald’s avoided over €1 billion (USD 1.1 billion) in European corporate taxes from 2009–2013 by shifting income from its European franchises to a Luxembourg subsidiary through use of royalty payments.
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