ECJ – Recent Developments in Direct Taxation 2014

I. S. 90Introduction

Tax avoidance by multinational enterprises and the failure of national legislators to prevent it – whether through deliberately created ‘loopholes’ in domestic tax law, lack of coordination among countries or insufficient countermeasures – has recently attracted much attention even outside the closely confined circles of tax policy experts. Internationally, this attention has culminated in the OECD’s BEPS project, which was launched in 2013 and is set to reach completion by the end of 2015; on a European level, the issue has become highly prominent in media investigations and reports on global companies with huge visibility in the consumer market, such as Starbucks, Apple and Amazon. While both the Council and the Commission have long attempted to apply the state aid provisions of the TFEU to curb ‘special deals’ that are granted selectively by Member States to certain domestic or foreign enterprises, the changed political environment seems to have had a substantial effect on this effort, which can particularly be seen in the high level of publicity surrounding recent investigations opened by the Commission.

This chapter assesses the action taken by Luxembourg against...