The European Union’s second-highest court is set to decide Wednesday whether to uphold a roughly $300 million tax bill that the bloc’s antitrust officials have said Amazon . com Inc. owes to Luxembourg.
The decision is a test for Amazon’s tax dealings in Europe, but the stakes are potentially higher for Margrethe Vestager, who is leading the EU’s campaign to curb alleged excesses by some of the world’s largest tech companies, including Amazon, Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
Ms. Vestager, an executive vice president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has already been rebuked once by the same court in a similar case. The General Court overturned her 2016 order that Ireland must recoup some 13 billion euros, equivalent to $15.8 billion, in taxes from Apple. Ms. Vestager has since appealed that case to the Court of Justice, the EU’s top court.
Ms. Vestager’s tax cases were among her first big salvos against tech companies in her role running EU competition enforcement. She later fined Google three times for alleged abuses of dominance, which the company is appealing. In recent months, she has also filed formal antitrust charges against Amazon and Apple for their treatment of rivals.
Both the Amazon and Apple tax cases are based on a facet of EU law aimed at creating a level playing field for companies across the bloc by forbidding governments from granting companies some types of state aid.
