"The Commission can order recovery of illegal state aid for a ten-year period preceding the Commission's first request for information in 2013"
The rules against state aid were always there in the various EU constitutional documents. Ten years is a long time, but it takes a long time to investigate complex issues and you don't want a system where it becomes worthwhile to stall the investigation and run out the clock.
The real message is that companies should refrain from trying to do "deals" with individual member states; doing so is extremely divisive. One of the arguments going around at the time of Brexit (I have no idea whether it's true though!) was claims of EU grants being used to move car part production out of the UK to Eastern Europe.
Edit: in fact, if you go through to http://ec.europa.eu/competition/state_aid/cases/253200/25320... and read the description, it appears to date all the way back to 1991, where Apple sat down with the Irish revenue and simply decided how much tax they were going to pay. That's how transfer pricing works.
See the actual EU press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm
"The Commission can order recovery of illegal state aid for a ten-year period preceding the Commission's first request for information in 2013"
The rules against state aid were always there in the various EU constitutional documents. Ten years is a long time, but it takes a long time to investigate complex issues and you don't want a system where it becomes worthwhile to stall the investigation and run out the clock.
The real message is that companies should refrain from trying to do "deals" with individual member states; doing so is extremely divisive. One of the arguments going around at the time of Brexit (I have no idea whether it's true though!) was claims of EU grants being used to move car part production out of the UK to Eastern Europe.
Edit: in fact, if you go through to http://ec.europa.eu/competition/state_aid/cases/253200/25320... and read the description, it appears to date all the way back to 1991, where Apple sat down with the Irish revenue and simply decided how much tax they were going to pay. That's how transfer pricing works.