EU antitrust authorities had argued the e-commerce giant gained an unfair advantage when it saved €250m through its complex corporate structure
ADVERTISEMENTAmazon didn’t break EU law when it negotiated a €250m discount on its tax bill from Luxembourg authorities, the bloc’s highest court ruled today (14 December).
Amazon.com slashed costs using royalty payments to a shell company for the best part of a decade, allowing it to detax three quarters of European profits, the European Commission had argued.
But judges at the General Court have already said the deal wasn’t an unlawful subsidy, and the higher-tier Court of Justice now agrees.
“The Commission has not established that the tax ruling given to Amazon by Luxembourg was a state aid that was incompatible with the internal market,” the court said today in a statement.
The ruling spells bad news for the EU’s fight using its state aid enforcement powers against multinational tax avoidance: it has also lost cases involving Engie, Starbucks and Fiat – though the jury is still out in a much bigger, €13b case involving Apple.
Amazon’s was one of a string of complex fiscal arrangements revealed by the 2014 LuxLeaks revelations – which embarrassed Jean-Claude Juncker, then President of the Commission, who was previously Luxembourg’s finance minister.
The bloc’s Court of Justice today said international tax norms don’t form part of EU law, implying that the General Court got the law wrong in its 2021 ruling.
But judges again found against the Commission, saying it had used the wrong reference system to figure out if Luxembourg had offered the multinational an unlawful carve-out from its usual rules.
A spokesperson for Amazon said the company "welcome[s] the Court’s ruling, which confirms that Amazon followed all applicable laws and received no special treatment," and that the European tax structure had changed after 2014.
A Commission spokesperson told Euronews the EU executive will "carefully study the judgement and assess its implications."
This story was updated at 15:58 CET to add comments from Amazon and the Commission.
