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@AllieRenison @RadoTylecote @MissVHewson @BenRamanauskas Radomir’s analysis of the World Duty Free case - and his thesis on State aid/tax generally - is, to put it kindly, a very bad take.
@AllieRenison @RadoTylecote @MissVHewson @BenRamanauskas And there is no basis *whatsoever* for a “line changed in 2016” thesis. That’s conspiratorial fantasy. The debate (technically, a debate about how to interpret “selectivity” in the world of differential tax treatment) has been live for many years.
@AllieRenison @RadoTylecote @MissVHewson @BenRamanauskas In particular the Commission decisions in the WDF case date from 2009 and 2011. Many years before Brexit was in prospect. And the General Court went the other way.
@AllieRenison @RadoTylecote @MissVHewson @BenRamanauskas It might have been a good idea for Radomir to have run his theory past some people who actually know about this area of the law before wasting large amounts of ink and paper on a poorly-researched article.
@AllieRenison @RadoTylecote @MissVHewson @BenRamanauskas PS - an important part of the background to the WDF case is that in the end it concerned a regime that gave favourable tax treatment to Spanish companies buying companies in other Member States.
@AllieRenison @RadoTylecote @MissVHewson @BenRamanauskas If you want to be “realist” about the way in which the ECJ deals with selectivity in tax cases - ie to discern a policy behind the legal argument -
@AllieRenison @RadoTylecote @MissVHewson @BenRamanauskas you are better off thinking of the policy as being to clamp down on Member States finding clever wheezes to use their tax systems to give a leg up to favoured sectors than as as being to take control of tax policy generally.
