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Citizens United. And the politicians who allow themselves to be bought out by corporations in the first place.

In cases of bribery, the person offering the bribe is usually punished more harshly than the person accepting the bribe. If it can be proven that the lawmakers threatened to change the laws unless Apple and other corporations paid them, that might be considered extortion in which case the extortionists would be punished more harshly. Lawmakers who accept money from the highest bidder are typically compared to prostitutes. But in prostitution cases, the person voluntarily soliciting and paying the prostitute is usually punished more harshly than the prostitute.

But for some reason we try to make it look like corporations are all virtuous and they all seek to abide by the law even though they have a direct involvement in putting their thumbs on the scale. It is another example of two-faced lecturing just like:

Vote and make your voices heard (while we increase gerrymandering and voter suppression).
Come to this country legally (while we put even more restrictions on legal entry).
Save money to buy a house (while rent and home prices keep increasing beyond people's ability to save more).
If you don't like the laws, change them (while we lobby to prevent any reforms).
Read the f--kin manual (while the information you need is not even in the f--kin manual).
 
In cases of bribery, the person offering the bribe is usually punished more harshly than the person accepting the bribe. If it can be proven that the lawmakers threatened to change the laws unless Apple and other corporations paid them, that might be considered extortion in which case the extortionists would be punished more harshly. Lawmakers who accept money from the highest bidder are typically compared to prostitutes. But in prostitution cases, the person voluntarily soliciting and paying the prostitute is usually punished more harshly than the prostitute.

But for some reason we try to make it look like corporations are all virtuous and they all seek to abide by the law even though they have a direct involvement in putting their thumbs on the scale. It is another example of two-faced lecturing just like:

Vote and make your voices heard (While we increase gerrymandering and voter suppression).
Come to this country legally (While we put even more restrictions on legal entry).
Save money to buy a house (While rent and home prices keep increasing beyond people's ability to save more).
If you don't like the laws, change them (While we lobby to prevent any reforms).
Read the f--kin manual (While the information you need is not even in the f--kin manual).
But while I disagree with it, the Supreme Court doesn’t consider lobbying bribery. I wish they would change it, but it’s an unfortunate reality we have to live with for now.
 
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That may be commonplace in the U.S where states compete for business with each other, but it's actually banned by the Treaty of Rome, i.e one of the founding documents of what would later evolve into the EU. If a company sets up in the country then they're supposed to have the same tax rate apply to them as every other company that's set up in the country.

At the time the Irish corporate tax was 16% (now 12.5%), but Apple got a special classified deal that gave them a tax rate of 0.05% and Ireland being in the EU common market they then routed all of their sales in the EU trough Ireland with this deal. Thus with the help of this classified deal, which was later leaked to the media, Apple was allowed to make profits in the billions in the EU and pay next to no tax on this profit.

As for what happened here Apple's extremely pricey lawyers were able to muddy the waters enough that there wasn't an absolute certainty in the eyes of the court that this gave Apple an absolute advantage over their competition in under what the Treaty of Rome prohibits. In other words they muddied the waters and convinced the court to apply a very narrow interpretation of the government assistance rules in the Treaty of Rome.

Actually, when Ireland joined the EU they kept their tax structure in place, as was the policy of the EU. Ireland and Apple then used that to their mutual advantage.
 
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That's what happens when you have all the best lawyers working for ya 🤣

So you are implying that Apple broke the law? I would get a decent lawyer if I were you as you will need one...oops you can't!
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No, no, no. Stop right there Ireland.

If you're going to be a hotspot for big corporations due to your attractive tax laws then you don't get to pick and chose when companies like Apple say they don't want to pay.

The whole system needs rebuilding. Apple and others don't pay enough tax, but politicians aren't changing laws because it means they too can also reap the rewards of not paying tax.

The Panama Papers exposed all that years ago.

No, no no stop right there! Please read the WHOLE article and understand that the EU itself said the original ruling was WRONG! Straight from the horse's mouth!
So your assertions are plan wrong. If however you still feel slighted the I suggest you take Apple and Ireland to court, in which case all the best.
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this is devastating news for the EU and just shows that the EU is yet another tax haven. But it was to be expected - the ruling isn't final and the EU will most certainly appeal.
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Apple paid 0.05% tax in Ireland and claimed they'd thought that was normal. Regular corporate tax in Ireland is 12.5%. They've been evading taxes left and right and trust me on this: the final court ruling will not be in their favour.

The EU can not appeal itself! The EU failed and Apple and more importantly common sense prevailed. End of story.
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Great so Apple can happily continue nickel and diming their customers whilst only paying centimes on the euro in taxes.

If you do not like it then change the laws or accept it and have a nice day.
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Great. Then they should give back all 40 billions of Euros they took from EU before they became the member state and agreed to play by the rules. They have Apple now. It's beyond obvious that Ireland did something they were never allowed to do, ruling doesn't even state what they did is legal it only states that incompetent commission did't prove the benefits which they surely will next time around.

And Cook as representative of multi-billion global conglomerate calling this a political game when at the same time that multi-billion conglomerate has a PO box in Lichtenstein for all of the iTunes sales in order NOT to pay tax money in US from the service.

That is not how ti works, you are saying that if you buy a car and then it turns out that you got the car for cheaper than you should have you would happily pay the discount back?
Err I do not think so!
Nothing wrong happened and if you disagree then change the law or accept it and have a nice day.
The only people whoa re complaining are those who somehow feel they are the ones who should have gotten that money instead?
Seriously ?
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Nope, it doesn't work like that. What they did is basically this: As long as jlc1978 resides in Ireland, jlc1978 will pay only sales tax of 0.05% on any purchase while the rest of the residents pay 23% That's not how subsidies and tax breaks work.

Nope, Ireland did nothin wrong and neither did Apple. Whether you like it or not the other EU states are just sour that Apple ddi not choose them. Case closed.
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You may want to learn your history and understand that Ireland today, transformed from poor farmers in an outpost island. is a result of decades of EU investment - in other words paid for by taxes from ordinary citizens and companies in other EU countries.

Just on a moral basis it’s unconscionable for Irish politicians to “repay” Europeans by offering rich companies an inside-EU tax loophole.

You may wish to learn the actual case and the article. Sorry it offends you that Apple and Ireland did nothing wrong.
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the only problem: EU has anti-tax-haben rules and Ireland violated them. They can’t just set their taxes to almost zero to attracted business away from other regions within the EU.

According to the EU they did no such thing, sorry!
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EU-apple-tax.jpg
The EU General Court today overturned a ruling by the European Commission stating that Apple should pay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in tax to the Irish government.

The court sided with Apple, and said the EU authority, led by antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, had failed to show Ireland's tax arrangements with the company were illegal state aid. Today's decision can be appealed.

Both Apple and Ireland appealed the original 2016 ruling, which stated that Apple owed the country over 13 billion euros in tax payments because the arrangements between the two countries were unfair.

In today's ruling, the General Court stated:


In 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the EC's original decision "total political crap" and said that Apple believed it would be reversed. "The decision is wrong, and it's not based on law or facts, it's based on politics. And I think it's very important that we stand up and say that very loudly," said Cook at the time.

In an emailed statement to Bloomberg, Apple said that it welcomed today's ruling.

Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Article Link: Apple Wins Backing of EU General Court Over 13 Billion Euro Tax Bill


I guess we all have to now read endless posts from armchair lawyers who are convinced that somehow they know better than the EU itself who said that no prof whatsoever was shown or even offered to prove that Ireland or apple did anything wrong. These armchair lawyers all seem to be upset that they did not get the money, as they feel they are owed it for you know...being them and sat on the computers.

Too sad that these people exist.
 
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That's not what happened. That's not even what the European Commission claimed happened.

Ireland issued a tax ruling, what Ireland calls an advance opinion and what in the U.S. would be called a private letter ruling. This was an interpretation of how Irish tax law might apply to Apple's situation. It didn't establish some special low rate for Apple. Rather, it said that - under Irish law - Apple could determine profit allocation between non-Irish and Irish branches of Irish corporations by using a costs plus method. The Commission couldn't demonstrate that that interpretation was contrary to Irish law and thus a special deal. I read the Commission's decision, there was no there there.

The real issue was the quirk of Irish tax law which didn't tax the income of non-Irish branches of Irish corporations.

is it genuinely as neat as that? It’s relatively common to exempt foreign PE income on the basis that it would be taxed in the jurisdiction where the PE was established, otherwise local tax would therefore be offset by tax credits from where the PEs paid their tax.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read the ruling but I was under the impression that there was a double Irish structure whereby income paid to the one Irish company by the other was deemed to be tax free. Income would go into Irish co 1 and be a deductible payment in the territory in which it was paid from thus eliminating these local taxes.

Irish co 1 then pay 99.9% of this receipt to Irish co 2. The first company pays tax on the minimal retention and then the second is free to dividend up the proceeds to (presumably) a BVI co or something like that. It enables someone to say with a straight face that Irish co 1 pays the full rate of Irish tax, but doesn’t actually address the issue of the “vanished” profits in Irish co 2. I believe it’s Irish co 2 and the concessionary treatment that the EU went after.

it would appear to me that the EU bungled in trying to prosecute this under state aid and no doubt it will be used to show why the EU supposedly needs a common consolidated corporate tax base. Try getting that through without a veto from the Irish, the Dutch or Lux.
 
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is it genuinely as neat as that? It’s relatively common to exempt foreign PE income on the basis that it would be taxed in the jurisdiction where the PE was established, otherwise local tax would therefore be offset by tax credits from where the PEs paid their tax.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read the ruling but I was under the impression that there was a double Irish structure whereby income paid to the one Irish company by the other was deemed to be tax free. Income would go into Irish co 1 and be a deductible payment in the territory in which it was paid from thus eliminating these local taxes.

Irish co 1 then pay 99.9% of this receipt to Irish co 2. The first company pays tax on the minimal retention and then the second is free to dividend up the proceeds to (presumably) a BVI co or something like that. It enables someone to say with a straight face that Irish co 1 pays the full rate of Irish tax, but doesn’t actually address the issue of the “vanished” profits in Irish co 2. I believe it’s Irish co 2 and the concessionary treatment that the EU went after.

it would appear to me that the EU bungled in trying to prosecute this under state aid and no doubt it will be used to show why the EU supposedly needs a common consolidated corporate tax base. Try getting that through without a veto from the Irish, the Dutch or Lux.

It's common for foreign corporations not to have their earnings - i.e. foreign earnings - taxed in a given jurisdiction. But that's not what Ireland's unusual tax rule allowed. It allowed foreign branches of Irish corporations to not have their income taxed in Ireland. So you could have an Irish corporation with Irish and non-Irish branches. The profits of the non-Irish branches might not be taxable in any other jurisdiction because they were profits of an Irish corporation (and the non-Irish branches might not have anything that represented a permanent establishment outside of Ireland, per the rules of other tax jurisdictions). At the same time, those profits weren't taxable in Ireland because of its unusual rule.

From there, the issue becomes... How do we determine which profits of the Irish corporation come from the Irish branches (and are thus taxable) and which come come from the non-Irish branches (and thus aren't taxable)? That's really what this case is about. Ireland allowed Apple to use a method which the Commission claims is contrary to generally-applicable Irish tax policies. So, the Commissions claims, allowing Apple to use that method represents state aid. Ireland claims the method is consistent with generally-applicable Irish tax policies. The Commission says it's a special deal. Ireland says it's their interpretation of their own tax laws.

The Commission's argument (as evinced by the decision it wrote) is, in essence, that the tax policy Ireland claims to have chosen is so bad - and so contrary to what others think would be proper - that Ireland couldn't have actually chosen that policy. It just made an exception to its real policy for Apple.
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But while I disagree with it, the Supreme Court doesn’t consider lobbying bribery. I wish they would change it, but it’s an unfortunate reality we have to live with for now.

Are you still alluding to Citizens United? Because Citizens United didn't have anything to do with lobbying.

It's up to Congress to make rules against lobbying, not the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court certainly hasn't said that Congress can't regulate lobbying. The Court has generally upheld the constitutionality of lobbying regulation, though it has said that certain regulations only apply in to certain activities. See, e.g., U.S. v Harriss (1954).
 
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I’m a little bemused by the idea of the Irish deciding not to tax an Irish company’s overseas branch that earned substantial profits but wasn’t a PE in the territory in which it was “situated”. Seems a tax avoiders charter to me! But such are the decisions of a country desperate for inward investment.
 
And Cook as representative of multi-billion global conglomerate calling this a political game when at the same time that multi-billion conglomerate has a PO box in Lichtenstein for all of the iTunes sales in order NOT to pay tax money in US from the service.

It does not matter which country Apple are registered in the end. They will have to pay taxes when they move the money back to the US company of Apple Inc.

Also any tax paid in Europe is less tax needed to pay in the US.
 
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I'm sickened bye the responses here. Go back 6 months ago to similar articles and you were all saying how the rich get away with murder and billions. I'm Irish and from a POLITICAL perspective, my country is just another tax haven for trillion dollar companies - companies that don't need any more money and yet use every trick in the book to divert maximum wealth to themselves - money that could go and be used MUCH more effectively for those with actual needs, for green climate policies, modernisation of our infrastructure, housing for the poor; all that ironically would happen through taxes. Our middle and working classes on modest wages pay for this.

Once something becomes taxes it ends up under the control effectively of the citizenship / the people because depending on their voting habits it's either used well for their benefit, not so well or abominably but that becomes our choice. It's sickening to see my government lick a companies ass like this for the minimal jobs that they provide in the West of the country. We house the TOP tech companies in the world and get NOTHING for it in terms of tax benefits - Facebook, Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Apple, Citrix... all in Dublin and/or Cork. They're all there for one reason - an incredibly low tax rate. That's our countries rich elite handing over our wealth to an outside rich elite, and hoping some software engineering jobs make up for it. Because of the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter (and many others) in Dublin, our rents have skyrocketed and made life incredibly difficult for those living in the capital. Dublin is San Francisco 2.0 in the making - and what we see is SOME get rich while the majority suffer from the economic impacts of "wealth creation".
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This is great news - both for Apple and for Ireland.

😎🇮🇪☘
Your naïvety is shocking - I'm Irish and to us this is our rich political class transferring our taxes to the US ultra rich. WE live in an age of truly shocking economic inequality and a government is working at the behest of a multi trillion dollar company to find it another €13 billion and "this is great news" for both?
 
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No it doesn't. It says Eu didn't prove Ireland commited a crime. A technicality.
It’s highly unusual to call “no proof of a crime” a technicality. Especially in a case like this, where all the facts are known. With all the facts known, “no evidence of a crime” means “no crime”.
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So will Apple comply if the legislature changes this in response the Court’s decision?
Apple has handed over the money already and it is currently in escrow. So if a higher court changes the decision then Apple won’t even be asked to comply, the EU will just keep the money instead of returning it.

Legislature changes can’t be made retroactively, so only future tax payments would be affected (unless laws have been changed already).
 
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I’m so impressed with the iPhone users at the EU’s second highest court that are so much better than the ones sitting in the previous one. Let’s see how much better the ones in the next one are.
That’s exactly why they have higher courts, my friend. And however unfashionable it may be these days, if you’re going to accuse someone of bias, the burden of proof rests on you.
 
Next time Ireland needs an economic bailout form EU, we should simply decline and let them sink...

Apple is not at fault but close to zero in tax mean that they are not paying its way for services and infrastructure in the EU or Ireland.

Back to the drawing board for the EU commission and this time no loop holes.

Note: VAT is payed by the customers (not Apple) and personal tax only cover services for that person in question and not the company they work for.
Ireland will be around long after the EU sinks under its own bureaucracy.
 
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A victory for common sense. Apple and Ireland made a mutually beneficial deal and Ireland is trying to build a strong economy for itself.
Highly beneficial for Apple; dubiously temporarily beneficial for Ireland, but leads to huge booms and huge crashes; terrible for every other competing country that then either has to put up with Ireland stealing the deals, or compete by lowering their taxes too, which means that Ireland doesn't win at all, and all the countries lose fair revenue to provide services and infrastructure for its citizens, and Apple et al laugh all the way to the bank; Ireland's citizen's gain temporary jobs boom in an economic boom, and then suffer a horrendous crash in a recession, and suffer the consequences of reduced government revenue and thus increased user-pays costs for services and floundering infrastructure; citizens of other European countries, well, surely you can fill in the picture her for yourself. In summary, it is horrendous for everyone except the shareholders of Apple et al, which, even though people like us may be "investors", we own tiddlywinks, and the vast majority of the shares are owned by billionaires, who's wealth is growing astronomically whilst we the people struggle more and more each year. In short, "deals" like this are a massive wealth shift from us to the ultra-rich.
 
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Good. If a country and a company make an agreement they mutually agree to, leave them alone.

That's great when such agreement doesn't affect others automatically, which is not the case with Ireland as full EU member. Apple takes advantage of the laws for a single EU market and at the same time takes advantage of a country that plays with the tax regulation to its benefit potentially hurting other EU members who can't have a say on that except via the EC.

This will certainly be appealed by the EC and will be won. The court just told didn't discuss much on the topic and told to the EC what they have to do to fix it (to win).
Though the solution is to fix the law so that Ireland and some other countries in the EU don't take advantage of each other when it comes to taxation.
 
this is devastating news for the EU and just shows that the EU is yet another tax haven. But it was to be expected - the ruling isn't final and the EU will most certainly appeal.
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Apple paid 0.05% tax in Ireland and claimed they'd thought that was normal. Regular corporate tax in Ireland is 12.5%. They've been evading taxes left and right and trust me on this: the final court ruling will not be in their favour.

It’s really amazing this “0.05%” number is still being quoted by people. How could there be so many people not having just the SLIGHTEST math capability?!
 
No it doesn't. It says Eu didn't prove Ireland commited a crime. A technicality.
.
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.
 
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No, no, no. Stop right there Ireland.

If you're going to be a hotspot for big corporations due to your attractive tax laws then you don't get to pick and chose when companies like Apple say they don't want to pay.

The whole system needs rebuilding. Apple and others don't pay enough tax, but politicians aren't changing laws because it means they too can also reap the rewards of not paying tax.

The Panama Papers exposed all that years ago.

maybe they don’t pay enough tax but I’m doubting that the need to rebuild the tax system therein makes Apple the bad guy here.

Margrethe Vestager, sorry but your grandstanding failed to show the legalities of tax evasion here. Great speech last year but no mettle to back it up. That’s the issue and since you haven’t been able to prove wrong here based on the tax laws then it’s highly unlikely this will get back to court. There is nothing here to see.

I really wish this big win would reflect in the stock today, $13 billion is a LOT of money - enough for probably half of Apple’s product lineup for R&D.
 
it would appear to me that the EU bungled in trying to prosecute this under state aid and no doubt it will be used to show why the EU supposedly needs a common consolidated corporate tax base. Try getting that through without a veto from the Irish, the Dutch or Lux.
Since the EU is a confederation, I share your doubt that things will change anytime soon.

A common tax structure would eliminate tax havens, and change the calculus for companies doing business in the EU in terms of how they approach taxation. While the states you mention would no doubt oppose it, I would not be surprised if others do as well fo fear it would eliminate preferential tax treatments they may give their own country's companies. It's easier to express outrage, while avoiding doing anythng to upset the status quo since you also benefit from it; like a current day Captain Louis Renault.

It's not just taxes. EU has no standard minimum wage law for similar reasons as no standard tax law.
 
It does not matter which country Apple are registered in the end. They will have to pay taxes when they move the money back to the US company of Apple Inc.

Also any tax paid in Europe is less tax needed to pay in the US.

Yes, but it helps the cash flow to not have too many non-US taxes en route to a return to the US, and you can pile it up and wait for the US Treasury to blink - which is exactly what has happened.
 
maybe they don’t pay enough tax but I’m doubting that the need to rebuild the tax system therein makes Apple the bad guy here.

Margrethe Vestager, sorry but your grandstanding failed to show the legalities of tax evasion here. Great speech last year but no mettle to back it up. That’s the issue and since you haven’t been able to prove wrong here based on the tax laws then it’s highly unlikely this will get back to court. There is nothing here to see.

I really wish this big win would reflect in the stock today, $13 billion is a LOT of money - enough for probably half of Apple’s product lineup for R&D.
But hasn't she, hasn't she shown and proven that multi-trillion dollar companies get away with paying virtually nothing for their place in the world and all the benefits that affords. That having trillions and being able to keep those trillions all for yourself is wrong, when Apple's own staff in Cork are probably on a 46% tax rate on their incomes, the company they work for pays effectively 0.005%. Our EU, let's not forget is an institution very favourable to capitalist interests - it's not a wonderful democratic tool of the general EU populace to use for its own purposes, considering it pushed through two law changes for EU nations that enforced mass privatisation of public utilities in the EU - "if the public utility could work in the market place then it should be in the market place" was their line regardless of what the public thought.

Please don't use "well the law says they did no wrong" - they did and do immense wrong everyday in avoiding taxes using my country (and Holland), its shockingly morally wrong and in the same vein as oil companies who lobby governments for no carbon taxes or to cancel renewable projects to favour oil fields - there's nothing illegal about doing that, it's just shamefully amoral and bordering on evil considering the state of things.

This is an exclusive "WIN" for Apple, not Ireland, not the citizens of Ireland, not the hospitals of Ireland, not the poor of Ireland, not the citizens of the EU, not the climate of the world, not the wealth equality of everyone to have a piece of the extremely concentrated pie. If you're an out and out capitalist free market believer, you don't care about this but from what I can see your system is dying a slow death, or it's bringing the planet and everyone else down with it.
 
So one judge says you have to pay €13B and another judge says no you don't have to pay €13B?
Is this how the justice system work?
 
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