The amount available at the end of the day for either Apple or the Irish government from lengthy legal proceedings over the company’s Irish tax affairs lost almost a billion dollars in the last year ahead of the final ruling. If the EU wins, the sum will be handed over to the Irish government; if the EU loses, it will be returned to Apple.
A quick recap: the State set up the escrow account in 2018 to hold €14.3 billion of alleged back taxes and interest that the European Commission ordered it to collect from Apple, even as the State and the iPhone maker appealed the matter before the courts in Luxembourg.
Apple and the Government won their case in 2020, with the General Court in Luxembourg deciding that the commission failed to show to “the requisite legal standard” that the US tech giant secured an unfair tax advantage in the decade to 2014.
A hearing on the commission’s appeal against that decision was heard by the European Court of Justice last month, with the court’s advocate general set to deliver his influential opinion on November 9th – ahead of a final ruling.
The escrow account is mainly made up of investments in euro-zone government bonds, rather than cash. The Department of Finance said on Wednesday that a further €259 million was knocked off the fund’s value last year, to bring it down to less than €13.4 billion.
MacDailyNews Take: When Apple wins, it should be compensated for the lost value of their money as it languished in escrow while mired in poorly performing euro-zone government bonds.
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