On 6 October 2014, the European Commission opened state aid investigations into a tax ruling dating from 2003 but still in force, enabling Amazon´s main European retail company, Amazon EU SARL, to pay a large portion of its income (2.1 bn in 2013) to Amazon Europe Holding Technologies SCS, a partnership not taxable in Luxembourg, for intellectual property rights to the Amazon website, allegedly not at arm´s length terms, only leaving a minimal profit (28.8 m in 2013) to tax in Luxembourg. The case is the forth prominent example of state aid investigations into countries´ tax rulings on multinational companies, following the cases on Apple (Ireland), Starbucks (Netherlands) and Fiat Finance (Luxembourg). None of these have been decided to date.
Zitat aus:
- European Commission press release, 7 October 2014
Press:
- Financial Times article (EN), 6 October 2014 (registration required)
- Handelsblatt article (DE), 7 October 2014
- Euractiv article (EN), 8 October 2014
