Brussels, 10/11/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 9 November, the European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, told the committee on economic affairs of the EP that it would probably take a long time to establish traditional guidelines to grant tax rulings which comply with EU rules on state aid.
“And so I will be focusing on how we can give the member states orientations”, she explained, acknowledging that this was less binding than issuing guidelines. However, Vestager said that tax rulings which comply with the EU rules could be possible by building on the direction taken in specific cases. Taking the example of the recent negative decisions on Fiat and Starbucks, the Danish Commissioner said that these cases allowed the Commission to advise a certain methodology in order to recalculate the tax burden of the companies in question. The amounts that Luxembourg and the Netherlands must recover from the two companies (between €20 and €30 million each) are not particularly significant in relation to the size of these companies, but it is the principle which matters: transfer prices cannot be manipulated and there are limits to what can be paid out for coffee beans or intellectual property, Vestager explained. It was by playing around with these factors that the two companies managed to transfer considerable amounts of profit, thereby bringing down their tax bills.
In response to the Greens/EFA member, Philippe Lamberts (Belgium), who asked her how she intended to identify specific tax rulings to investigate, Vestager said that she would be looking at the most obvious cases, in order to learn as much as possible from these. She explained that in the 300 cases currently being analysed, a number of rulings turn out to have been set in place by the rules.
When asked by Germany's Burkhard Balz (EPP) about country-by-country reporting, which the MEPs are calling for and which is currently being weighed up by the European Commissioner, Vestager said that lessons could be learnt from the experience of the banks, which do apply this country-by-country reporting, which tends to show that it is manageable and that it can exist without harming businesses. Nor will it show where there is state aid, but it could prevent illegal state aid. “If you have this reporting, it becomes obvious whether you are paying taxes in the countries in which you operate”, she explained.
Finally, she disagreed with Peter Simon (S&D, Germany), who said that the Commission should have access to the information on rulings exchanged between the states. The competition services “have some very sharp tools” to obtain information, said Vestager.
It is worth noting that on the same day, the Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, said that he expected a Commission decision before Christmas on the tax arrangements entered into by his country with Apple. (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)