Dear Mr. Cook,
how you conduct business at home is obviously between you, the American government, and the American people. I said as much in my original letter. But if you're doing business abroad in Germany, it may serve you well to remember that Germany is not a shareholder economy, but a stakeholder [1] economy. Maximizing shareholder profits is not the only thing a corporation is supposed to care about.
As the German Corporate Government Code states, for example: "The Management Board assumes full responsibility for managing the company in the best interests of the company, meaning that it considers the needs of the shareholders, the employees and other stakeholders, with the objective of sustainable value creation." [2]
Obviously, we're talking about largely unenforceable social norms here, though it raises the question as to whether you're really acting within the spirit of the law. More importantly, where social norms are increasingly bypassed and subverted, statutory change tends to follow. For example, corporate tax avoidance mechanisms have revived discussion about the EU's Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) [3], which you may find considerably less profitable than your current setup.
Equally obviously, such legislation may not pass. But the more aggressively multinational companies pursue tax avoidance schemes, even if perfectly within the letter of the law, the more support legislators will have for enacting statutes that counter such schemes.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Krach (equally fictitiously)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_(corporate)
[2] http://www.dcgk.de/en/code/current-version/management-board....
[3] https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/company-tax/c...