Advocate General Juliane Kokott proposed to the Court of Justice of the European Union, on Thursday 3 December, to annul the judgment of the General Court which had ruled that the European Commission had failed to fulfil its obligations under the EU Treaty by not sufficiently justifying that the Belgian tax ruling on the exemption of excess profits, from which 55 multinationals benefited from 2004 to 2014, constituted an illegal State Aid scheme (Case C-337/19).
According to Ms Kokott, the appeal brought by the Commission after the judgment of the General Court of February 2019 (see EUROPE 12194/29) does not concern the substance, but the possibility for the Commission to challenge - as a single entity - a large number of advance tax rulings, whereas 28 actions involving other beneficiaries of the alleged aid are currently suspended before the General Court.
According to the Advocate General, the Commission sufficiently demonstrated in its decision that its sample is representative overall and thus sufficient for the purposes of proving a consistent administrative practice. For her, the General Court was wrong to consider that the two further conditions for the existence of an aid scheme, namely that no further implementing measures are required and that the beneficiaries are defined in a general and abstract manner, were not met.
Ms Kokott therefore proposes that the case be referred back to the General Court which must still assess whether the advance tax rulings concerning the downward adjustment of profits really constitute State aid and whether the recovery of the alleged aid infringes, in particular, the principles of legality and of the protection of legitimate expectations.
See the conclusions: https://bit.ly/3lE0jOG (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)