251–260 of 708 posts
Until these fines become meaningful, companies will just continue breaking the law and asking for forgiveness later, as the changes to their market cap can offset this fine in hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, it's nice that Ireland is finally not a poor country anymore. That's primarily due to EU politics and support. It is, however, economically nowhere even close to France or Germany, no matter how large you think the "tech job" market there is [0]. > If any one of our EU or the other non EU countries were really dissatisfied with Ireland, they have the right to withdraw at any time. Who should withdraw from what?…
How could we be? We're not a post-colonial power like France or Germany who spent years exploiting the African continent in egregious human rights violations. It is literally only since 2021 that we have reached our pre-English Genocide population levels of 1851 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/ireland-popula... Germany has 20x our population, France is not far off it. Neither has anything close to the j…
> Germany has 20x our population, France is not far off it. Neither has anything close to the job market per capita in the IT and Services sector that Ireland has.
If you say so. And yet those employees are payed less.
These jobs exist because Ireland gave US companies large tax breaks and because it is an English-speaking country. Otherwise they would perhaps been based in the UK before Brexit.
It's good that Ireland attracts business, but encouraging tax dodging is not the way and this particular judgement is an opportunity to acknowledge this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand it, it's not really like Ireland is demanding Apple pay suddenly, the EU is saying that Apple owes Ireland the 13B and has to make up the losses due to Ireland & Apple colluding to strike an tax deal that is unfair (for all other EU members) for Apple. Ireland itself probably doesn't want to do this, since those deals exist for a reason.
To be exact, the ruling is that Ireland gave unfair advantage to Apple, compared to other companies. If Ireland want to set corporate taxes at 1%, it can, but it should be for all companies. Amazon notably didn't get the same deal Apple did, which is anti-competitive.
So Ireland double-dipped here by luring the tech companies, and now it gets the foregone tax anyway. Does feel a bit like the EU should get the cash, not the state that was responsible for it
> Does feel a bit like the EU should get the cash, not the state that was responsible for it The EU court judges that a member country didn't tax a company enough, so the EU takes the money? That would be ripe for abuse.
For non-EU readers, note that taxation is explicitly not a competency of the EU (i.e. Ireland can set its tax levels to whatever it wants). The only thing in question here is whether it was applying the same taxation rules to all companies, as granting special exceptions to certain companies could be viewed as state aid (which is not allowed). Ireland claimed it wasn't, the current (over-)ruling says otherwise. This…
Eg Ireland might give a tax incentive if a large Fortune 500 company hires X people in Ireland.
Question: does this ruling prohibit that common practice?
Even if this sounds like a huge fine, this is effectively meaningless, even if they end up paying it. 13 billion, for a company with market cap of more than 3 trillion is around 0.4% of their cap. Until these fines become meaningful, companies will just continue breaking the law and asking for forgiveness later, as the changes to their market cap can offset this fine in hours.
Up until recent years the EU didn’t even know if it could take action against U.S. based tech giants. Now that the EU has established wins in fines, usb-c, user replaceable batteries, and alternate app stores, I expect EU regulators to take even bolder action.
Even if this sounds like a huge fine, this is effectively meaningless, even if they end up paying it. 13 billion, for a company with market cap of more than 3 trillion is around 0.4% of their cap. Until these fines become meaningful, companies will just continue breaking the law and asking for forgiveness later, as the changes to their market cap can offset this fine in hours.
Tax bills have to be paid in cash, not stock. A better analogy is to simply look at Apple’s net profits, since that’s where the money will come from.
$13B is not nothing, even for Apple.
Even if this sounds like a huge fine, this is effectively meaningless, even if they end up paying it. 13 billion, for a company with market cap of more than 3 trillion is around 0.4% of their cap. Until these fines become meaningful, companies will just continue breaking the law and asking for forgiveness later, as the changes to their market cap can offset this fine in hours.
Even if this sounds like a huge fine, this is effectively meaningless, even if they end up paying it. 13 billion, for a company with market cap of more than 3 trillion is around 0.4% of their cap. Until these fines become meaningful, companies will just continue breaking the law and asking for forgiveness later, as the changes to their market cap can offset this fine in hours.
Even if this sounds like a huge fine, this is effectively meaningless, even if they end up paying it. 13 billion, for a company with market cap of more than 3 trillion is around 0.4% of their cap. Until these fines become meaningful, companies will just continue breaking the law and asking for forgiveness later, as the changes to their market cap can offset this fine in hours.