EU commissioner Hogan kept in dark on €13bn Apple tax ruling

European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development Phil Hogan was not informed about the details of this week's Apple tax ruling by Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager until Tuesday morning, it has emerged. The decision was made public at 11am on Tuesday.

Irish officials in Dublin and Brussels were taken unawares at the scale of the European Commission ruling which ordered the Government to recoup €13 billion in unpaid taxes from Apple.

It is understood that while Mr Hogan’s office signed off on the Apple decision through written procedure on Monday, the final figure was not included in the documentation. This was disclosed by the commission to the relevant parties less than two hours before the media announcement.

Fast-tracked

While standard competition decisions are usually taken by means of a two-week notification procedure, the Apple case was fast-tracked in 24 hours, a mechanism used for particularly sensitive cases.

It is understood Ms Vestager briefed her fellow commissioners, including Mr Hogan, about the competition case at their annual political think-in in the Belgian coastal town of Knokke on Wednesday.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook and members of the Government have accused the commission of taking a political decision in relation to the record state-aid finding against Apple.

It is expected that United States president Barack Obama will raise the issue with commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council president Donald Tusk at the G20 summit in China, which begins on Sunday.

Washington has reacted furiously to the commission’s recent clampdown on the tax practices of multinationals.

Italian mewspaper La Repubblica reported on Friday that German chancellor Angela Merkel discussed the state-aid case with her Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi, and expressed concern that the ruling risks becoming a deterrent for multinationals intending to invest in the European Union.

Former commissioner

As the fallout from the Apple ruling continues, the commission hit back on Friday at comments made by former competition commissioner Neelie Kroes in which she strongly criticised the judgment. In an article for the Guardian newspaper, the former Dutch commissioner, who held the competition brief between 2004 and 2010, said state-aid law should not be used for tax matters, criticisng in particular the retrospective nature of the ruling.

“EU member states have a sovereign right to determine their own tax laws. State aid cannot be used to rewrite those rules. However, the current state-aid investigations into tax rulings appear to do exactly that,” she wrote.

A commission spokesman rejected Ms Kroes’s claims, alluding to the former Dutch politician’s current role as an adviser to Uber.

“We understand that it may be sometimes challenging to reconcile the role as a former commissioner with the temptation to publicly express the views of those, in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, who oppose the commission’s decisions. This [piece] seems to criticise how the commission applied state-aid rules, but the fact is that they were not applied in the way it was alleged,” he said.

He repeated Ms Vestager’s call on Thursday for Ireland and Apple to be “as co-operative as possible” in ensuring the full non-confidential version of the ruling is published as soon as possible.