State Aid Investigations in the EU: Are US Firms Being Unfairly Targeted?

Although the policing of state aid to corporations is not part of the mandate for competition authorities in most jurisdictions worldwide, the European Union competition enforcement agency (DG Comp) has embraced this role since the late 1990s. In recent years, a number of high-profile investigations by DG Comp into state aid given to prominent US companies has raised a question as to whether the agency may be unfairly targeting US firms. In this article, we investigate whether there is any evidence to support such a claim.