It's a bad day in Europe for two of the world's tech giants.

Hello, this is the Marketplace Morning Report and we're live from the BBC World Service.

I'm Leanna Byrne. Good morning.

Apple, up first, it's just lost a long running case in Europe and now it has to pay

Ireland $14 billion in back taxes because its tax relationship with Apple broke EU state aid law. To explain here's the BBC's

John Campbell in Belfast. Hi John. Hello there. John what was it about the

specific tax arrangement between Apple and the Irish government that the EU deemed illegal.

Well, really what the EU was alleging and what has now been found to have been the case

was that Apple basically got an unfair subsidy.

It got a sweetheart tax deal from the Irish authorities.

And EU countries, they're allowed to make their own tax arrangements that isn't decided

by the European Commission in Brussels,

but what EU countries mustn't do is give unfair advantage to one company over another.

And that's what Apple is found to have done. Now this has been a very long

legal process but it's now at an end the EU, the European Commission has won, Apple has lost. The bizarre thing though in this is that the

Irish government has also lost, it supported Apple, but the loser here, the Irish government,

now is going to have to collect 13 billion euro plus interest which will

go into its company's coffers. It didn't want to do that didn't it not so what

is it going to do with the money do we know it is most likely

to do something quite boring with it which is to pay down some of

Ireland's national debt the other thing it could potentially do is use this money to help boost Ireland's sovereign wealth fund.

So Ireland has just recently set up a sovereign wealth fund that it's going to use to invest.

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