By Tom Fairless

BRUSSELS-The European Union won't meet a self-imposed June deadline for deciding whether four multinational companies including Apple Inc. (APPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) benefited from illegal tax sweeteners, the bloc's antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Tuesday.

"We won't meet the deadline we set ourselves [of] the end of the second quarter," Ms. Vestager told European lawmakers at a hearing Tuesday. She said she wouldn't give a new deadline for finalizing the cases.

The EU has opened a series of high-profile probes in recent months into tax deals struck by four multinationals-Apple in Ireland, Amazon and Fiat SpA (FCA.MI) in Luxembourg and Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) in the Netherlands. Ms. Vestager had pledged to reach a decision by the end of June as to whether the deals violate EU law, which could be followed by significant back-tax demands.

The investigations have been a priority for the EU's executive arm at a time of deep national austerity, as governments across the continent seek to shore up their finances and demonstrate to taxpayers that wealthy multinationals are paying their fair share of tax. EU regulators have no authority to impose tax policy on the bloc's 28 governments, but they are using an EU-wide ban on selective state aid to companies to crack down on individual tax deals that they deem to have given an unfair advantage to certain enterprises.

Write to Tom Fairless at tom.fairless@wsj.com

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