Structuring and Delimitations. In addition to the decisions mentioned above, there have been other recent Commission decisions concerning State aid in taxation. In January 2016 the Commission concluded that Belgian “Excess Profit” tax scheme, which reduced certain multinational companies´ tax base artificially, was illegal State aid.27 Furthermore, the Commission has initiated State aid investigations on Luxembourg´s tax treatment of McDonald´s28 and Amazon29. However, this dissertation concentrates on the three abovementioned decisions of the Commission concerning the aid granted to Apple, Starbucks and Fiat. All these three decisions are about individually granted tax rulings that the Commission claims to be beneficial to the undertakings. The Belgian tax scheme case is about more general tax practice of a Member State and the XxXxxxxx´s and Amazon cases are still pending in the Commission. Since this dissertation concentrates on the legality of recent individual APA rulings from the perspective of State aid rules, this limitation is justifiable. Naturally, the criticism of the APA decisions is not limited to the claims concerning the topics of the research questions of this dissertation. There has been a lot of criticism of the Commission´s application and definition of the arm´s length principle in the APA decisions. For example, the Netherlands and Ireland claim that the Commission has defined incorrectly the arm´s length principle it has used when assessing the existence of advantage in the APA rulings. Furthermore, all the appellant Member States claim that the APA rulings did not actually deviate from the arm´s length principle.30 Also a number of legal scholars have criticized the Commission’s analysis of the derogation of arm´s length principle of the APA rulings.31 Nonetheless, this dissertation concentrates on the selectivity condition and the accessory issues presented in chapter 1.2. Therefore, in this dissertation I will not treat the questions about whether the APA decisions deviated from the arm´s length principle and whether the Commission´s application of arm´s length principle was correct. However, in order to be selective, the State aid measure has to favour certain undertakings. Therefore, the conditions of selectivity and advantage are strongly linked. In the case of the APA rulings, the advantage 27 Commission decision C(2015) 9837 The excess profit exemption State Aid Scheme implemented by Belgium, 11 January 2016, Article 1 of the conclusion. 28 Commission deci...
