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Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

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Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#71

Post by icebraining »

threeseed wrote: post #58
onion2k wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it Apple's problem that Irish law disagrees with EC agreements? Yes. To the tune of €13bn. At the scale Apple operates their legal team should be considering whether the deals they negotiate are legal in all the applicable jurisdictions, not just the local one. The Irish government should also have done a better job, so part of the blame lies with them, but that doesn't free Apple of all responsibility. In any cas…

To be fair to Apple there wasn't a clear precedent set before this. There definitely is now though and you can be sure legal teams around the world will be advising senior leadership teams to rearrange their corporate structures accordingly.

Fiscal State Aid was declared illegal almost two decades ago; Apple was trying to walk a fine line here.

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#72

Post by threeseed »

pfortuny wrote: post #64
threeseed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is NOT a fraud and any characterisation of it being so is ridiculous and wrong. Apple followed the law. End of story. The issue is that the EU found that the law was illegal under state aid rules.

Well the problem is that the EU has a legal structure and if you want to do business in IE then you have to abide by EU's rules. So it is AAPL's lawyers' fault, in the end. Hence, AAPL's. This is another issue why I am strongly against the EU. You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS... So you cannot even be sure to be abiding by the law if you obey a country's laws.

Did I say Apple didn't share the blame with Ireland ?

I just fully disagree with using the term fraud to describe what happened.

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#74

Post by icebraining »

pfortuny wrote: post #64
threeseed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is NOT a fraud and any characterisation of it being so is ridiculous and wrong. Apple followed the law. End of story. The issue is that the EU found that the law was illegal under state aid rules.

Well the problem is that the EU has a legal structure and if you want to do business in IE then you have to abide by EU's rules. So it is AAPL's lawyers' fault, in the end. Hence, AAPL's. This is another issue why I am strongly against the EU. You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS... So you cannot even be sure to be abiding by the law if you obey a country's laws.

You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS... So you cannot even be sure to be abiding by the law if you obey a country's laws.

That can happen in every country which has a constitution.

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#75

Post by piva00 »

eru wrote: post #33
Scirra_Tom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is 0% tax on profits fair and reasonable exactly?

If you tax something, you get less of it. Either because you actually really get less of it, or because you encourage clever accounting. (Just look up Hollywood accounting..) People making profit isn't something we need to discourage. How about taxing CO2 emissions and eg alcohol consumption instead? (Something we can live with less off.) And the old classic: put most of the tax burden on unimproved land value. Land'…

Actually people making ONLY profit is something we should discourage, people investing back their profits and sharing the pie with others is what should be encouraged.

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#76

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

pfortuny wrote: post #64
threeseed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is NOT a fraud and any characterisation of it being so is ridiculous and wrong. Apple followed the law. End of story. The issue is that the EU found that the law was illegal under state aid rules.

Well the problem is that the EU has a legal structure and if you want to do business in IE then you have to abide by EU's rules. So it is AAPL's lawyers' fault, in the end. Hence, AAPL's. This is another issue why I am strongly against the EU. You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS... So you cannot even be sure to be abiding by the law if you obey a country's laws.

> This is another issue why I am strongly against the EU. You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS...

That's true whenever you have international treaties. The WTO has plenty of clauses that go very close to disallowing this type of stuff in slightly different contexts. Same applies to the states within the US. They are bound by federal law in many ways.

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#77

Post by phillc73 »

estel wrote: post #28
eru wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? 0% tax on profits would seem fair and reasonable. (There's lots of stuff that's not taxed. Eg not a lot of people complain about not taxing capital gains of home owner/occupiers.)

Because other companies pay about 20%. If you want to completely reform our taxation system, sure, whatever. But that doesn't impact Apple's liability under the current one.

Ireland's official corporate tax rate is only 12.5% on trading profits[1] anyway, which is one of the lower rates in the EU, not 20%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_in_Europe

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#78

Post by legulere »

beilabs wrote: post #31

6% of total Irish national debt... I wonder how much Irelands payroll taxes would have been were the corporations not to have set up shop in Ireland, they would have just gone somewhere with a decent tax arrangement. Unemployment in the 70's and 80's was brutal in Ireland, personally, I think the government at the time made the right choice, however, this "selective treatment" allowed Apple to pay tax rate of 1% on E…

> I wonder how much Irelands payroll taxes would have been were the corporations not to have set up shop in Ireland, they would have just gone somewhere with a decent tax arrangement.

A better question is where the world would be if nation states wouldn't allow multinational companies to pay only negligible taxes by taking part in a race to the bottom.

With tax deals like this one you're just ripping other countries off.

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#79

Post by georgespencer »

rdslw wrote: post #4

Good. Read how Tim Cook publicly considers Nobel economist Joeseph Stiglitz as a one who do not know what he (Stiglitz) is talking about. Eye opening. Excerpts from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/wp/2016/08/13/2016... Q: What do you say in response to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz’s comments on Bloomberg [television], where he called Apple’s profit reporting in Ireland a “fraud”? Tim Cooks answer: I did…

> Read how Tim Cook publicly considers Nobel economist Joeseph Stiglitz as a one who do not know what he (Stiglitz) is talking about. Eye opening.

TC's answer was about repatriating money, not about tax reporting in Ireland. I'm not sure why he chose to answer that question, but the reporter let him get away with answering a totally different question.

Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple

#80

Post by ch4ck »

pfortuny wrote: post #64
threeseed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is NOT a fraud and any characterisation of it being so is ridiculous and wrong. Apple followed the law. End of story. The issue is that the EU found that the law was illegal under state aid rules.

Well the problem is that the EU has a legal structure and if you want to do business in IE then you have to abide by EU's rules. So it is AAPL's lawyers' fault, in the end. Hence, AAPL's. This is another issue why I am strongly against the EU. You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS... So you cannot even be sure to be abiding by the law if you obey a country's laws.

This is false. EU rules have to be transposed into members states' national law to be binding.

http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/scoreboard/performance_b...

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