By Tom Fairless 

BRUSSELS--European Union regulators will explain on Tuesday why they believe that tax deals granted to Apple Inc. and Fiat SpA violated EU law, an EU spokesman confirmed on Monday, marking the next formal step in the bloc's drive against alleged tax avoidance by multinationals.

The European Commission, the EU's central antitrust authority, opened formal investigations in June into whether tax deals granted to Apple in Ireland, Fiat's finance arm in Luxembourg and Starbucks Corp. in the Netherlands amounted to illegal state support for the companies.

The commission will publish its so-called opening decisions in the Apple and Fiat cases on Tuesday, explaining why it believes that tax deals agreed between the companies and the governments in question amounted to illegal state aid, the spokesman said.

"We have doubts that [the companies] may have been granted selective treatment, preferential treatment, compared to what another company" would have received under the countries' general tax laws, the spokesman said.

Apple, Fiat and other interested parties will have a month to respond to the decisions once they are published in the EU's Official Journal, which will take place in "a few weeks", the spokesman said.

The regulator isn't yet ready to publish its opening decision in the Starbucks investigation because negotiations with the Dutch government over which information to release publicly are taking longer, the spokesman added.

A spokeswoman for Fiat had no comment, and Apple and Starbucks couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

A spokesman for the Irish government said it is "confident that there is no breach of state-aid rules" in the Apple case. Ireland "has already submitted a formal response to the commission earlier this month, addressing in detail the concerns and some misunderstandings," he said.

The decision to examine the tax deals through the lens of the region's state-aid rules, a first for the European Union, means the commission could eventually demand that the companies return any unpaid taxes, tax experts said. It wasn't clear how large these sums would be.

The publication will shed light on the EU's investigation into alleged illegal sweeteners offered to multinationals in several EU countries, which is understood to have been under way for more than a year.

EU competition chief Joaquín Almunia has said the investigation could span much wider. It has already covered Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and the British territory of Gibraltar.

At issue are the comfort letters, known as tax rulings, sent by governments to multinationals to give clarity on how a specific tax will be calculated. These would be illegal if they gave selective advantages to some companies.

This week's expected moves are a formal step aimed at giving interested third parties--such as Apple and Fiat, which aren't themselves under investigation--a chance to comment, said Martina Maier, an antitrust lawyer with McDermott Will & Emery in Brussels.

The published documents are unlikely to contain confidential information such as the sums of money involved, Ms. Maier said. But they will shed light on the reasoning behind the commission's decision to open the investigations, she said.

While the companies themselves aren't under investigation, their input is being sought because they would be required to return any unpaid taxes.

The investigation will focus on "transfer-pricing arrangements," under which companies can redistribute profit within a group by charging for goods or services sold by one subsidiary to another, typically located in different countries.

Experts say companies can use transfer pricing to minimize their tax bills.

While not illegal, such arrangements could violate EU rules if tax authorities allowed specific companies to charge prices internally that didn't reflect market conditions.

In the three cases under investigation, the commission is concerned that national tax authorities allowed the companies concerned to underestimate their taxable profits, thereby granting them an unfair advantage over competitors, Mr. Almunia said in June.

Mr. Almunia is to leave his post at the end of October and will be succeeded by former Danish Economy Minister Margrethe Vestager.

The commission will base its decision in Apple's case on guidelines on transfer pricing established in 2010 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of rich countries, a person familiar with the matter said.

The move came after earlier efforts by the EU to crack down on tax avoidance and tax evasion made painfully slow progress and yielded little. Despite much hand-wringing by some politicians over Ireland's low corporate tax rate, tax policy remains largely in the hands of national governments, which can veto EU decisions.

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

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