51–60 of 708 posts
If companies avoid tax and rich people avoid tax it means more tax for normal people who work for a living.
Good. Not because I particularly dilike Apple or big US tech firms (I have a whole bunch of Apple stuff right here), but because Ireland has been able to undermine the tax regime of the whole EU, by giving these sweetheart tax deals to big firms, who can then run their entire EU business from there. This gives an unfair tax advantage to the multinationals over homegrown EU companies, skewing the market. Is it Apple's…
Surely an EU company, if big enough, could have moved to Ireland and negotiated a similar deal. I understand that the issue here is the nature of the deal with a specific company, but the EU does not want member states to have too much leeway to cut taxes in any case. They have set minima for corporation tax and VAT, for instance. Ultimately this is a question of competitive advantage and of ways for small, peripheri…
[1] https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/taxation/business-taxa...
prior to brexit, the UK lost a ton of US inward direct investment to Eire … Dell, Intel, Apple etc. the factors were Eire corporation tax was low and public policy was to footdrag in the attempts to set an EU minimum tax, fantastic lobbying by Irish representatives in Washington leveraging the big Irish diaspora, big subsidies that walked to the edge of the EU rules (as seen here), and an English speaking workforce w…
In the Irish language, the name of the country is "Éire", but saying that in English is like saying Magyarország instead of Hungary. The accent on the first letter isn't optional, and the pronunciation is difficult, it's hardly worth it.
Please just say "Ireland".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely an EU company, if big enough, could have moved to Ireland and negotiated a similar deal. I understand that the issue here is the nature of the deal with a specific company, but the EU does not want member states to have too much leeway to cut taxes in any case. They have set minima for corporation tax and VAT, for instance. Ultimately this is a question of competitive advantage and of ways for small, peripheri…
> an EU company, if big enough, could have moved to Ireland and negotiated a similar deal. Probably not, because their home country would go after them / make Ireland liable. These kinds of schemes usually work across jurisdictions
What does "illegal" mean? Why is it in quotes? Did they break the law or not? If they didn't break the law, if they adhered to the deal they negotiated with Ireland, isn't this a dangerous precedent? You can just ignore deals because you (EU) said so? Edit: Please downvote me if you must but also post a comment about why I'm wrong. Thanks!
The EU isn't applying any penalty here, this is owed taxes that apple were not billed by the Irish tax authorities.
Once you enter the EU, you forfeit part of your sovereignty. That's what Ireland failed to do here. There is no slippery slope. This is the very foundation of the union.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely an EU company, if big enough, could have moved to Ireland and negotiated a similar deal. I understand that the issue here is the nature of the deal with a specific company, but the EU does not want member states to have too much leeway to cut taxes in any case. They have set minima for corporation tax and VAT, for instance. Ultimately this is a question of competitive advantage and of ways for small, peripheri…
The major problem is that Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. Luckily they understood this was alienating the other EU members and so they conceded to a minimum of 15% taxation rate [1] [1] https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/taxation/business-taxa...
> "We always pay all the taxes we owe wherever we operate and there has never been a special deal," he said. Ιf that is true it should be easy to prove. Letting them pay peanuts is an insult to the whole of EU by the Irish government
Seems wrong that Ireland cheated the system to attract tech companies then also gets a huge payout.
The idea was that these big companies will move back to the big centers (Paris/Frankfurt) once they have to pay the same taxes. That didn't happen (surprise) and Ireland is now ending up with a tax deluge and high value tech companies.