I have no love in my heart for Apple.
At the same time, it's not like they don't have enough lawyers. So I have to assume that anything involving billions of dollars would be strenuously vetted. I might be wrong, but I'm starting from there.
And if they were supposed to pay taxes, they were supposed to pay them. Purposefully evading taxes is wrong. Avoiding taxes is another matter. Complex tax codes to change society work because we assume that people will be actively avoiding them. So good for them. They're playing the carrot and stick game that governments like us all to play.
If true, this means that they did the right thing that the best-informed legal minds could offer in order to legally avoid taxes. It worked for a while then suddenly the rules changed. And they changed not just for the future, but retroactively.
What occurred to cause a rules change? It wasn't the law. It wasn't Apple's behavior. It became a story in the U.S. about how companies are getting away without paying their "fair share". The EC was the one that acted, and the only thing that makes sense to me is that the EC saw an opportunity and appointed a commission. Not arbitration, not a criminal or civil trial. A commission.
Quite frankly, this looks like a stick-up. Apple's a big company and can take care of itself. I really hope that the same kind of thing doesn't happen to mid-sized and smaller companies trying to eek it out in the EU. It's not just bad for the companies involved: it's bad for the reputation of the union as a whole. You can't keep changing the rules up if you're trying to tweak regulatory issues to promote long-term growth. Nobody with any sense is going to trust you.