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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

#221

Post by barking »

allendoerfer wrote: post #204
barking wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the moral equivalency that you are implying there exists between US gas prices etc and VW providing fabricated statistics. My point is that the EU and Germany failed to uncover this. Also Germany and France have both in the past chosen to ignore the rules of the EU/Euro club without sanction. That it is far easier for the EU regulators to pick on one of the small fry countries and make negative fin…

VW cheated, but the bigger moral problem and the underlying topic is not the cheating but the pollution that was hidden by it. And suggesting that VW is polluting more than US brands is just nuts. Edit: Just wanted to make clear, that of course the cheating should have totally been caught in Europe earlier. The thought that the US is not biased with its domestic brands just made me chuckle.

>The thought that the US is not biased with its domestic brands just made me chuckle.

Who suggested that, or for that matter who suggested that "VW is polluting more than US brands"?

I know I didn't.

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

#222

Post by fulldecent »

Scirra_Tom wrote: post #22
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.)

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

Because all AAPL shareholders pay taxes on their pro-rata share of the company in the form of capital gains tax and dividends tax.

Also, because this is a valid and consenting agreement between Apple and Ireland, two consenting adults.

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

#223

Post by flexie »

astaunton wrote: post #190
flexie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is Apple's problem and no, Apple is not a victim in this thing. The EU treaty is Irish law as well and lawyers from all over the union (myself included) have been looking on at this blatant violation of EU rules for years wondering how long multinational companies would be able to keep the schemes alive. The Irish people have voted for politicians who adopted the EU treaty which bans subsidies to large corpor…

The issue is not that Apple did not pay tax, nor is it Ireland giving Apple a good deal. Ireland charged tax based on reported earnings in Ireland, not world wide, for a child company of Apple that says it is based in Ireland but has revenue income from around the world. The EU has decided that all revenue income for that company should be charged in Ireland, although the US say they have also paid tax in the US. Fun…

Ireland is hardly a scape-goat. The commission has dealt in a similar manner with Amazon in Luxembourg, Starbucks in the Netherlands, and Anheuser-Busch InBev in Belgium.

Whether or not there is an agreement between Apple and Ireland or just an understanding that Ireland would not tax them on almost any income is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that the effect of the scheme has been that Apple has paid next to nothing in tax on all European profits in more than a decade, spanning from the sale of your first iPod to your newest iPhone. That income has been channeled through the Irish companies and Ireland has not taxed it with it's usual corporate tax (which, by the way is now merely 12.5 percent). It is appalling.

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

#224

Post by yread »

zigzigzag wrote: post #96
icebraining wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unjust_enrichment Having to pay back the taxes that were due is not a punishment, it's simply restitution.

But no taxes were due, according to the tax collectors themselves. Meanwhile the EU is not a tax collection body, it does not set tax policy and it does not issue tax rulings. It has no power to do this and I'm unaware of any countries that want it to have this power.

The EU is not a tax collection body, but there is this:

> The Commission can order recovery of illegal state aid for a ten-year period preceding the Commission's first request for information in 2013.

from the press release http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm

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

#225

Post by fulldecent »

Maybe Apple spent $10M or whatever in taxes in Ireland over the past 10 years. And of course corporate profits are imaginary so you can imagine them happening anywhere on the globe.

If I owned a small country on an island, I would be more than happy to allow Apple to imagine its profits were on my island and I would only charge $5M for the privilege. And I would be grateful for the $5M.

What would you do with your small island?

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

#226

Post by fulldecent »

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…

Krugman is another example of a f* idiot who won a nobel prize.

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

#227

Post by refurb »

legulere wrote: post #78
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…

by taking part in a race to the bottom

You mean countries competing for business? Why is that bad?

It would sound ridiculous if you applied it to companies "Car companies offering lower and lower prices is just a race to the bottom! If this keeps up we'll have no car companies as they'll all be bankrupt!".

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

#228

Post by toyg »

dogma1138 wrote: post #211
barking wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They forced Ireland to 'take one for the team' and prevent contagion by repaying bad commercial bank loans from overseas banks to the failed Irish banks. In other words they prevented Ireland from doing an Iceland. They hinted that new, shared burden, measures, to be put in place, to cover such eventualities in the future, would be applied retrospectively to Ireland but they weren't. During the bailout term the EU/EC…

Yeah it wasn't pretty. Ireland was not allowed to default on its loans which was what they should have done. It did not control its currency or banks which are effectively controlled by the ECB. It could not repay some or all of its loans with its own currency by simply printing more of it and the only way of getting more currency was taking on more loans. What people also don't understand is that the laws preventing…

> the laws preventing incentives aren't protecting the weak they are protecting the strong.

That's not entirely correct. These norms were introduced to open up nationalised markets like telecoms, mail etc, which would otherwise remain forever locked on national boundaries. This allowed an equal field for businesses across the Union. Of course, established markets tend to favor the richest players.

This approach is supposed to be complemented by infrastructural funds, where German and French taxpayers effectively pick up the bill for rebuilding Ireland or Romania to a state where they can compete on an equal foot.

> Neither Apple not anyone else would give 2 cents about Ireland

That's very unfair to Ireland. Ireland has a natural advantage nobody can take away: sharing a language with the richest and most powerful nation on the planet. That's worth a lot, in this day and age.

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

#229

Post by Tomte »

rayiner wrote: post #164
eru wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple paid taxes according to Irish laws. Is it Apple's problem that Irish law disagrees with EC agreements? (Seems to be Ireland's problem.) If people want companies to pay certain taxes, they should vote for politicians that pass laws that require companies to pay those taxes.. In any case, we should be taxing land value. That's harder to avoid: you can't hide land.

Ireland isn't a sovereign country. It's an EU member state. So it's like Apple violating Federal law and saying it's okay because what they're doing is legal under California law.

You've got an unusual definition of "sovereignty".

I'm not sure about US states (I would have thought they are considered sovereign member states of the Federation, but I haven't researched the issue), but the much less incorporated European Union certainly consists of "sovereign" states.

Or was it just a linguistic shortcut for "Ireland has submitted itself under treaties and laws of the European Union"?

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