Equal treatment in EU fiscal State aid law: new article on Apples' EU Tax Dispute i.e. Apple 2.0
ECE Brussels President of the Executive Board, Aleksandar Ivanovski, has published a new article in European Taxation (IBFD). It continues the research from his doctoral thesis at Queen Mary University of London.
Article
"Beyond the Tax Rulings: Apple 2.0 - Capital Allowances, Equal Treatment and the Limits of Member State Fiscal Autonomy under Article 107(1) of the TFEU", IBFD, 2026
The Court of Justice of the European Union's 10 September 2024 decision in Commission v. Ireland and Others (C-465/20 P) closed one chapter of the Apple controversy and opened another. The Grand Chamber found that the pre-2015 IP-related profits were attributable, for Irish tax purposes, to the Irish branches of Apple. That finding weakens the factual premise of the post-2015 structure. Apple 2.0 is the operation of section 291A of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 between 2015 and 2017. It raises State aid questions distinct from the closed dispute, and those questions bring into operation the equal treatment rationale of Article 107(1) TFEU.
PhD thesis
Interaction of EU State Aid and Taxation: The Principle of Equal Treatment in Fiscal State Aid Law (Queen Mary University of London, 2023)
The thesis examines how EU State aid rules apply to national tax measures. It argues that the selectivity criterion under Article 107(1) TFEU is best understood as an expression of the principle of equal treatment, a general principle of EU law. On that reading, Member States' tax sovereignty ends where discrimination between comparable undertakings begins. The thesis tests this against the Court of Justice's fiscal State aid case law, including the Apple and Fiat litigation.
*Written in a personal academic capacity. The views are the author's own and not those of ECE Brussels nor CFE Tax Advisers Europe.
More information available on Aleksandar Ivanovski’s LinkedIn profile:
