They'll honestly make that money back by that time if they actually have to pay.
So you think it's a stick out tongue affair that a company with the supposed reputation of Apple has allegedly been evading paying it's taxes with the alleged encouragement of another government for all these years?
This is just one snippet of how this is being reported across Europe. -
Dominic O'Connell, Today business presenter
The current focus is on the size of the bill, but there are even larger issues at stake, including one fundamental question - who really runs the world, governments or giant corporations?
At present, it is difficult to tell. Individual governments appear impotent in their attempts to apply their tax laws to multinationals like Apple. They have systems designed to deal with the movement and sale of physical goods, systems that are useless when companies derive their profits from the sale of services and the exploitation of intellectual property.
In Apple's case, 90% of its foreign profits are legally channelled to Ireland, and then to subsidiaries which have no tax residence. At the same time, countries can scarcely afford not to co-operate when Apple comes calling; it has a stock market value of $600bn, and the attraction of the jobs it can create and the extra inward investment its favours can bring are too much for most politicians to resist.
There is an echo here of the tycoons of the early 20th Century who bestrode America. Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Rockefeller were judged so powerful that they were almost above the law, something that successive US administrations sought to curb.
The European Commission's attempt to bring Apple to heel is on the surface about tax, but in the end about the power of the multinational and the power of the state. There is more to come; Margrethe Vestager, the Danish commissioner who is leading the charge against Apple, is warming up to take on Google.
Europe versus the giants of corporate America will be a battle royale, and one that will run and run.
