William Fry paid €3.5m for Apple tax case advice

Breakdown of legal fees shows former attorney general and five future judges also advised the State

The total legal bill in relation to the case was €10.176m over 12 years. The single biggest recipient was Dublin based solicitors firm William Fry, It earned €3.5m, including VAT, for advice on the case, the bulk of it in 2017 and 2018, around the time of Ireland’s initially successful challenge to the original EU Commission ruling.

British barrister Philip Baker, a Kings Council (KC), is the highest earning individual lawyer listed in the breakdown of fees that has been released. He earned €820,000 for his work on the case. Mr Baker took the lead for the Department of Finance on the case. He is a member of Field Court Tax Chambers in London and highly regarded as an expert in the law of international aspects of taxation.

The next biggest individual earner was Paul Gallagher SC, who served as attorney general (AG) to then Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s government from June…