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Tim Cook to Receive Award From Irish Prime Minister Celebrating 40 Years of Apple Investment
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“Celebrating 40 Years of Financial Support Through a 0.0010% Tax Rate”
Apple isn't remotely as big in the EU as it is in the US, so I doubt that anyone will feel "pressured". And when the UK will have left the EU, Apple UK will also no longer be in the EU -- how could that possibly help Apple to save taxes in the EU???
Also, Europe is slowly but surely waking up and recognizing big US tech companies as the threat to national/European security that they actually are. If anything, the EU should and will scrutinize US-American tech companies even more in the future (and not just because of their tax schemes).
I'm sure they had a double irish with a dutch sandwich for lunch 
Anyone else care to step in and verify these claims. They seem like bogus to me. I’m a bit busy right now, but I absolutely plan to gather some evidence and investigate these claims, then call him out on it (I strongly suspect).
I’ll be sure to get in touch or post a new thread once I’ve done so.
Are you Irish @The Mercurian?
I dont think EU was right in demanding Apple pays retroactive Taxes, it just shows how corrupt the EU is.
fact is the EU has a single market (if they dont like if they could change it.) because of that single market Apple has to pay its EU tax burden to a EU member state and they chose Ireland because they worked out the best deal and even outside of that "sweetheart deal" have one of the lowest corporate taxes of the EU members because Ireland sees benefits by encouraging businesses to move there due to it (if they didnt they'd change it.)
basically its the EU reneging on a deal they made already and retroactively punishing Apple for past offenses that aren't illegal.
think of it this way lets say your moderately well off and make about 210K
your current income tax bracket is 35%, how would you like it if the Government said we want more money, in the 80's your tax bracket would have been 70%
so we're going to charge you the other 35% for this arbitrary period of time(in apple's case 24 years 91 to 15) also we will charge late payment fee's.
people would be livid and rightfully so, if you follow current law you shouldn't be retroactively penalized.
the EU could make a moral argument for changing laws going forward as well as unifying tax law across members but they haven't.
what the EU did/is trying to do is gross and thats coming from someone that doesnt like "tax loopholes"
but unlike most people pro EU in this matter, I recognize that is just jealousy that the tax credits the average person utilizes aren't as good as what a corporation that can afford army's of accountants can find.
everyone uses "tax loopholes" any tax credit is a "loophole" is a legal device for minimizing tax burden, anyone eligible for one can choose not to claim it to have to pay more tax, but most people don't so don't be a hypocrite.
Just because it isn't illegal doesn't mean it is something worth celebrating. These two parties cut a deal and the rest of EU countries got the short end of the stick. Needless to say, rest of the EU will sooner or later close down on Ireland.
Unsurprisingly, there are numerous comments from people who don't know how business works about Ireland being an unfair tax haven.
They're getting the jobs without the toll that manufacturing always takes on the local ecology. Sounds like Ireland is getting the better deal.
It was true that Apple didn’t pay there owed tax to Ireland, and as a member of the EU Ireland itself is under due diligence to follow EU tax regulations. The EU commission deemed they did not do that with Apple giving them an unfair advantage over its competition, stating it was illegal state aid.
So Ireland has to pay the money back, not Apple, but Ireland collects the money from Apple, I believe it’s around 12 billion US and is sat in a bank whilst the case is being investigated and dragged through the courts. But to me it was a clear breach of EU regulations.
If you research it their is all the information out there you need
Re: Irish Data Centre Planning Fiasco - it came out that the main objectors were two gangster brothers who bought land in Wicklow to try and lease it out as data centre. Even had the cheek to ask Apple if they wanted to use their site after they spent months and years (and god knows how many brown envelopes to other 'objectors') getting Apple planning rejected.
Strange is that a company which pays the lowest possible taxes in Europe receives an award!!!
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a BIG red star.
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a BIG red star.
And a dozen or two members of the Apple-hate club have something to complain about today... everyone is happy!
Asif you wouldn't want to try and minimise your tax if you were running a company the size of Apple. Everyone tries to minimise their tax, and anyone who says they aren't are lying.
"If the EU doesn't want companies avoiding taxes by setting up tax shelters then it should enact laws that prohibit such tax shelters." It did - the conclusion was that the tax agreement was was illegal (in terms of non-competative) state aid.
Apple's EU tax dispute - Wikipedia
Immoral?
"As a result of the allocation method endorsed in the tax rulings, Apple only paid an effective corporate tax rate that declined from 1% in 2003 to 0.005% in 2014."
The company I run pays 22% tax on profits because it's not large enough to use, or pay for, tax loopholes.
On the salary I draw from my company I pay net 35% tax (as well as 14% employer taxes on my gross salary), that appears to be necessary to run a modern first world country, with access to a labour pool and infrastructure that Tim Cook and Apple benefit from.
I would consider the that paying thousands of times less than what I have to pay as both a employer and employee whilst still using the countries infrastructure as immoral.
I'm not a socialist, I think there can and should be a spread of income and wealth for a healthy society. Claiming that 4000x difference in effective tax is somehow justified and "moral" appears to lack any serious introspection into human values.
I see, in your personal history book, EU has existed for more than 40 years. As a result, when Apple invested at Ireland in the first place 40 years ago, it was already making use of EU's existence.
What a stupid mindset to hype on manufacturing!!!!! Even if you ignore the thousands of the finance, research, engineering staff at Apple Cork, and only count the testers there, they earn a lot more than the normal manufacturing workers, why do you always focus on the least paying jobs???
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"If the EU doesn't want companies avoiding taxes by setting up tax shelters then it should enact laws that prohibit such tax shelters." It did - the conclusion was that the tax agreement was was illegal (in terms of non-competative) state aid.
So yes, there was something illegal about it.Apple's EU tax dispute - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Immoral?
"As a result of the allocation method endorsed in the tax rulings, Apple only paid an effective corporate tax rate that declined from 1% in 2003 to 0.005% in 2014."
The company I run pays 22% tax on profits because it's not large enough to use, or pay for, tax loopholes.
On the salary I draw from my company I pay net 35% tax (as well as 14% employer taxes on my gross salary), that appears to be necessary to run a modern first world country, with access to a labour pool and infrastructure that Tim Cook and Apple benefit from.
I would consider the that paying thousands of times less than what I have to pay as both a employer and employee whilst still using the countries infrastructure as immoral.
I'm not a socialist, I think there can and should be a spread of income and wealth for a healthy society. Claiming that 4000x difference in effective tax is somehow justified and "moral" appears to lack any serious introspection into human values.
If you ever have a VERY VERY basic math capability, you know that "0.005%" number is PLAINLY PLAINLY wrong, no EVER EVER chance to be true!!!!!! Come on, use your brain when reading government documents or press.
Do you realise that is a bit of an offensive comment to make? What name should our Taoiseach have?
It’s absolutely correct that the taxes would be Irish. All EU Member States have absolute sovereignty over direct taxation including the rate, which is why Ireland halved their corporate tax rate from 25% to 12.5% about 20 years ago. EU Member States must however exercise their tax sovereignty in a manner which is consistent with EU rules so State Aid has often proven to be a way to challenge tax sweetheart agreements that Member States have drawn up.
Apple took advantage of a more lax attitude towards these rules in the 1980s with some fairly outrageous tax structuring but this was done with the full connivance of the Irish tax authorities. its fair to say that neither Apple nor Ireland are sorry about what they did. They are just sorry that they “got caught”.
what will be interesting is whether Ireland has to clean up its act post Brexit as it won’t be able to rely on the UK to veto additional tax harmonisation measures which some of the EU states are keen to impose. But this is a topic full of rank hipocrisy and virtue signalling so best avoided!
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You’re splitting hairs there. Sure the EU as a name is a post Maastricht construct but Ireland joined the European Economic Community with effect from 1 January 1973 as did the UK.
Apple promised investment into what was then a fairly backward and poor outpost of the EEC and in return got an incredibly advantageous tax deal which basically “disappeared” vast amounts of profits into notional corporate vehicles which were then not taxed.