Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

EU State Aid Rules - Investigation into Preferential Tax Rulings: European Commissioner for Competition

12:30 pm

Ms Margrethe Vestager:

That is not to be said in general. I am talking about all the tax rulings that we have been going through. We have been going through a sample of a thousand tax rulings, most of them from Luxembourg, but from every EU member state that has an active tax ruling practice. When we go through these rulings, we sort them out into confirmatory rulings, transfer pricing rulings and financial rulings. When we look at the transfer pricing rulings, what we are looking for is whether they are backed up by documentation. When a transfer pricing ruling is done, one wants to see that the prices used approximate market prices. Otherwise, a stand-alone company that has do its input shopping on the market and sell its products on the market would be highly disadvantaged. Of course, this is what we are looking for. In a number of cases, we find that the work is very well done and that there are no concerns, no further questions to be asked and no strings attached. The thing in this ruling and the reason we reached the result we did was that we found that no questions were asked and there was nothing to back up the idea that the profits should actually be made in the headquarters.

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