401–410 of 708 posts
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I find it interesting how in american corpspeak "uncertanty" pretty much always means "our lawyers can't find a way to avoid this law without getting caught" ^^
Well yeah. The prime way they avoid the law is compliance. You would also be pretty pissed off if you couldn't avoid a law fining you for something you couldn't avoid.
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There's not much uncertainty for business really. If you're pulling the moves that Apple and other companies pull to "optimize tax", then you are with 100% certainty trying to game the system and violating the spirit of the law.
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This is about the EU which uses a completely different legal system than the US so any US legal reference is basically useless.
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> their net profits to the Polish exchequer I believe that part of the reason is that they still pay other taxes (eg VAT) in the country of sale.
VAT is a tax paid by the consumer, not the manufacturer. If you buy an iPhone, it's you that pays the VAT on it, not Apple.
Do the dollars that make up the profits, and the dollars that make up the taxes on profits, come from somewhere else than the dollars that make up the VAT?
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The downside of state debt is the downward spiral. If you spend 1/2 your tax income on just servicing the debt, that means either fewer services for people, or borrowing yet more, just to keep things going. If you borrow more, then it gets even worse. I really prefer that 1/2 my tax bill doesn't go to interest payments.
Let's say a city builds a bridge that doubles its tax income by opening up a lot of economic opportunities. It pays for this with a 35 year bond. During these 35 years, the entire additional income that the bridge generated goes towards paying off the bond. After the 35 years the bond is paid off and the city enjoys permanently raised tax income (not to mention better economy for residents). Was there a problem that…
I could go into a lot of reasons, but I'll keep it simple.
It is incredibly rare for governments to break that cycle. This has been demonstrated over and over. Thus, there is no end in 35 years. There is just perpetual 50% taxes to interest on debt.
This means that as it is a persistent state, not perpetually losing 50% tax revenue would make an enormous difference.
It's just not helpful.
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There is a general prohibition on EU member states granting state aid to companies, but there are exceptions to this where the aid is justified in order to promote economically underdeveloped regions. There are a lot of rules and court cases about when state aid will fall on one side or the other of that line. See eg https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/state-aid/legislatio...
You Seen knowledeble on this topic. What do you think of the numerous Deutsche Bank and Lufthansa aids?
Lufthansa did receive state aid during the pandemic. This is currently under investigation as the EU’s approval was annulled by an EU court: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
I don't understand why this is Apple's fine and not Ireland's?
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.
Market cap is the theoretical value of all the company’s future growth/cash flows brought forward to today. It’s speculative, and fluctuates with the stock price. 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.
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I read through the first part of the ruling to get a better idea of what happened. Apparently, Apple wrote to the Irish tax authorities, and said "this is how we plan to calculate our taxes" and the Irish tax authority said "okay, no problem, that works for us" and the EU commission investigated some years later, and said "wait, was that method of calculating taxes available to all Irish companies? We don't think so,…
Seems like Ireland should have to pay the EU
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I read through the first part of the ruling to get a better idea of what happened. Apparently, Apple wrote to the Irish tax authorities, and said "this is how we plan to calculate our taxes" and the Irish tax authority said "okay, no problem, that works for us" and the EU commission investigated some years later, and said "wait, was that method of calculating taxes available to all Irish companies? We don't think so,…
Seems like Ireland should have to pay the EU
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I read through the first part of the ruling to get a better idea of what happened. Apparently, Apple wrote to the Irish tax authorities, and said "this is how we plan to calculate our taxes" and the Irish tax authority said "okay, no problem, that works for us" and the EU commission investigated some years later, and said "wait, was that method of calculating taxes available to all Irish companies? We don't think so,…
Seems like Ireland should have to pay the EU