Margaretta Vestaire, the European Unions Director at General for a Competition, is well known in the United States for actions like a ruling last year that Ireland had granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, resulting in a fourteen billion dollar liability for Apple. She says she's enforcing Europe's view of a fair market. What we are looking at is, of course the competition and uh, and we do want to see that also the successful company is also going big, but
they allow for others to challenge them. But some see an instinctive mistrust of big corporations on her part, and the Staire's tenure has provoked anger from many large American companies. Samath sup Supermannian as an award winning author and a contributor to Bloomberg Business Week, and he has written a profile of Vastaire for Bloomberg Business Week which is out now. Samantha, thanks for being here with us. Uh. You know, she seems to have a particular person active on matters of
competition in Europe. What is it that is her sort of philosophy about how to approach questions of fair competition? Well, I think her basic philosophy over here is that Europe has a very fixed and definite view of what a fair market is, and that view may differ from how the Americans view to how the Chinese view it. Um. And you know that's fine, for each market has its own rules and its own perspective. But if you want to play in Europe, you have to play by the
European rule book. Um. And this is uh, this is this is this sort of a foundational philosophy of the EU itself is that if the market is policed well and sensibly a certain way, it sort of distributes the widest and deepest benefits to society. So in you know, from the from the point of view of the US, it can often seem as if we use vision of a free market is much more constricted and narrow. But I think we have to sort of look at it from within the EU itself and trying to see what
they're trying to achieve. You write that in late March, the Office of the US Trade Representative reiterated its opinion that the STAY is deviating to form far from prior case law. And you quote one former Treasury official from the Obama administration is saying her staff resembled a bunch of plumbers doing electric work. Explain that is she deviating from prior case law. Well, I mean, I don't think he's deviating so much, a sort of pushing the envelope
a little bit. But we have to remember these are these are very specific times we're living in, you know, after two thousand eight, not only in Europe, but even in the US, there's been sort of a widespread public sentiment because there are too many corporations getting away with too much sort of with paying two little tacks that they can't say, sort of evading or eluding paying the rightful amount of tax by setting up officers and attacks
haven about moving money around overseas. And this is a sentiment that is not just prevalent in Europe but in the US as well. Uh so, so the rules that vest Tailor and her office are playing by. The rules are already there on people, they are part of the brief of the office itself, but she's certainly being sort of a lot more activist in the way in which
she's enforcing them. Some months. The the way that you know, it comes across to a lot of American companies, particularly companies like Apple, where that have been the subject of rulings by the EU that haven't been in their favor. Sometimes it looks to them as though she's really and she and her her colleagues in the EU are really targeting big American multinational companies. Is that a fair assessment of the way that she and the EU have approached
these matters? No, I don't think it is. I mean we have to remember that a lot of her so calls are big American cases that she's ruling on now, which is Apple, last year, Google, which to be later this year. All these cases were actually opened during the tenure of her previous of the previous Competition commissioner. You
of who's from Spain. And if you look at the statistics of the number of cases that she has opened during her own tenure, I mean they don't They answer wildly off the charts in terms of how many American companies they target. Just to give you an example, her predecessor opened two hundred seventy six anti trust cases during his tenure, or thirty nine of them were American investors. Two and a half year terms. So far, eleven out of eighty one companies have been American in the anti
trust cases she's opened. So the ratios aren't sort of you know, you know, they aren't really they don't justify the kind of prevalent sense that she's anti American. I think it's just the sort of the size of the Apple Award, combined with the particular timing of Apple and Google and Star Wucks and Amazon, all of these cases coming together over the course of one or two calendar years, that's making it seem as if she's she's particularly vindictive
towards the big American cooperation. But I don't think that's the case. You write about her discussion of competition law in the severe moral terms of a biblical patriarch. Is she strict by the rules and no room for compromise? I think he is. I think there's this sort of, uh, it's a very black and white world that that she inhabits. I think, I mean, she used to be a politician in Denmark, and you know the nature of being a politician itself is you sort of compromise here and there,
you make deals. You don't automatically get sort of the ideal vision of the world that you want. And a lot of people who have met in Copenhagen said that she's really come into the office that she can best inhabit, the office of the of the competition commissioner, something where you're handed a playbook or rule book and you literally just you you could sit in a tower and make these decisions based on what's given to you on paper. There's no sort of there's not much room for negotiation,
don't have to cut deals. It's really sort of cut and dried, and it's something that she's she has temperamentally been suited to almost all her career. Well, speaking of her career, well, how is it that she ended up in this position. I mean, she was a very she was sort of a young tyro in Danish politics. M she joined in when she was twenty. She joined her party in first ran for the Danish Parliament. She lost that particular race, but she's been working with her party
ever since she was twenty years old. It's a party that has a particular kind of fondness for policy wonkery. I guess you could call it. Uh. They are sort of an essentially pragmatic party where they do what's best for the people are regardless of which part of the ideological spectrum of solution comes from. So she rose quite fast.
And I think in sort of the mid two thousand's she became known very quickly, uh for sort of taking tough decisions, for taking decisions that she believed to be right, even if it earned her a men it of fun, popularity over top colleagues, over the people, and uh. And she was part of a coalition government and she did quite well over there. She was a Minister of the economy and she as a minister of the economy, she was working a lot within the intra u circuit of
economic and finance ministers. So I think when it came time for Denmark to appoint somebody uh to the new you commissionered it, they chose Westo Well. Our thanks to Samantha Supermanian for joining us today to talk about his Bloomberg Business Week article on Margaret Margaretta Vestaire excuse me,
the European Union Director at General for Competition. A lot of companies around the world, not just in America, Google, gaz prom, Apple, Fiat, Amazon, Starbucks, are going to be affected by her actions in the upcoming couple of years. That's it for this edition of Bloomberg Law. We'll be back tomorrow. Thanks to our technical director Christoper Come and
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