No it doesn't. It says Eu didn't prove Ireland commited a crime. A technicality.
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The EU General Court found that the highly-politicized commissioner Margrethe Vestager levied the fine without showing that any actual rules had been broken.
That is not a technicality. That is innocence.
You may feel that countries should not have sovereignty over their own tax affairs. I do not doubt that, eventually, all taxes in EU member states will be centrally levied and collected by the EU. That is openly stated as the direction they want to move in, especially now that one of the bulwarks against federalization, the UK, is leaving.
The problem, in this case, was that Margrethe Vestager tried to go too fast, too soon. Each member state joined the EU as an independent country and the public in each country was led to believe they were joining a particular type of union. In 1973, when Ireland and the UK joined, it was known as the "European Community" and presented itself as a straightforward common market with no ambition to become a superstate.
Under the rules in place at the time, Ireland was absolutely entitled to continue attracting foreign investment in the ways it had before joining the European Community. Over the decades, the EU rules have slowly stretched into more areas of life, and Ireland has changed its own rules accordingly.
For an EU commissioner to retroactively apply today's EU rules to Ireland's 40-year relationship with Apple was patently absurd and it was widely recognized for what it was: political bullsh*t, targeting the world's most famous brand to bring glory to Margrethe Vestager, just as all her other high-profile cases have.
It should be noted that Ireland's policies on encouraging direct investment have done far more to transform the country than any infrastructural investment from the EU. That has always been about standardizing infrastructure throughout the continent as a way to expand the market for German manufacturers.
In the same way, the introduction of the Euro mainly helped German manufacturers who were suffering from the strength of the Deutsche Mark. There is a reason why, today, most Irish families regularly shop in German supermarkets Lidl and Aldi. We have no Greek supermarket chains. The EU has never been a charity.
Even before joining the EC, Irish governments of all parties prioritized the creation of jobs for our young, educated, English-speaking population. If any foreign company was willing to make a serious investment in Ireland, creating good jobs, those governments were willing to forego some tax revenue.
As a country that had been devasted by immigration for centuries, it was vital to allow Irish people to pursue worthwhile careers in their own country, allow the skill base to become more sophisticated, and allow Irish families to lift themselves up by building equity. We all agreed that we wanted Irish people to have the option to remain in Ireland.
Apple has used Ireland as its EMEA base for 40 years. They have always engaged positively with our universities and colleges. They currently directly employ over six thousand people in Cork, a relatively small university city, with many more indirect jobs throughout the region. Ireland and the Irish people have grown alongside Apple and thousands of other foreign companies.
Contrary to the astonishing view, expressed by one or two people in this thread who claim to be Irish, that foreign companies have somehow stolen from the Irish, the reality is that almost all of Ireland's current wealth stems from establishing Ireland as a good place to do business, with hard-working, intelligent, well-educated people. To have such a distorted understanding of
the entire basis of your own country's economic development over the past half-century betrays an alarming degree of economic illiteracy.
Successive Irish governments have strenuously objected to this political overreach by Margrethe Vestager. She has a track record of mugging high-profile targets that will appeal to her left-wing supporters, so, she wins even when her decisions are overruled.
Margrethe Vestager and her co-conspirators are systematically making the EU a worse place to do business. This hurts everyone but especially the East European countries who have joined in more recent decades. They have the same sort of young, hardworking populations that need direct investment to create employment.
Those poorer EU countries need the flexibility to persuade foreign corporations to place their European headquarters in, say, Bucharest rather than Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam or other rich EU cities that have already had the opportunity to establish themselves. I sincerely hope that the
next Apple will place their EMEA headquarters in Bulgaria or Croatia, it is their turn now.
