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:

No. It is not too scientific but we have some figures that give an idea of the legal state aid, which may sound strange. We do state aid control and we all talk about the provision of state aid but in Europe we give a lot of state aid. From the top of my head, in energy alone the state aid per year in Europe is €30 billion. There is a lot of legal state aid around. We do not have any figures for the illegal state aid. That is due to the nature of it. If it is illegal we usually do not know about it. We only know when we have taken a decision on the investigation that it was illegal and that there is a particular sum. The Apple decision is extraordinary in that respect. It is a very large sum, which reflects that it is a very large company. In the other cases there has been recovery of between €20 million and €30 million and in the Belgian scheme, it was €700 million.

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