EU Commission Concludes Investigation into Amazon, Fiat, and Starbucks Tax Agreements

Brussels (Eurotoday) – The EU Commission closed state aid inquiries into tax rulings granted by Luxembourg and the Netherlands to Amazon, Fiat, and Starbucks.

The European Commission has announced that it has closed three in-depth State aid investigations into transfer pricing tax rulings granted by Luxembourg to Fiat and Amazon, and by the Netherlands to Starbucks. The Commission concluded that the tax rulings did not grant the parties selective advantages.

Did Amazon, Fiat, and Starbucks receive unfair tax advantages?

In 2015 and 2017, the Commission discovered that Luxembourg granted selective tax advantages to Fiat and Amazon, and the Netherlands to Starbucks, in violation of EU State aid rules. In each case, the European Commission figured that a tax ruling issued by the respective national tax authority artificially reduced the tax paid by each party and therefore granted them a selective advantage over other businesses. The Commission’s original decisions in all three cases were ultimately rejected by the EU Courts and therefore the respective in-depth examinations remained open.

According to the EU Commission, taking into account the direction of the EU Courts, it has adopted three final decisions closing its in-depth investigations and verifying that, when granting their respective tax rulings, Luxembourg and the Netherlands did not give these Fiat, Amazon and Starbucks selective tax advantages disobedient to EU State aid rules.