Not enough.
A 250M fine is almost a joke. Companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc, save Billions of dollars every single year by setting up "creative" tax schemes.
A 250M fine is almost an incentive to keep doing it.
A 250M fine is almost a joke. Companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc, save Billions of dollars every single year by setting up "creative" tax schemes.
A 250M fine is almost an incentive to keep doing it.
* They will spend 10+ years in courts to fight it; paying a team of lawyers to fight the ruling or at least postpone having to pay it will be cheaper than paying it. * They'll get out and find a new tax haven.
250 - 500 million seems to be a figure that gets paid eventually (see also EU/RealPlayer vs MS). Higher than that and they'll find a way to not have to pay it and annoy a lot of people - legally.
They reportedly paid £15M tax on profit of c.£20 Billion.
I.E. apple's "but this guy down at the pub told us it was legal"* defence fails the bonus pater standard as apple highly paid legal council should have known better then accept it as a indication of actual law.
*In reality there was a unpublished letter from some politician, who did not actually have the authority to speak on irish tax law, to apple stating that Irish revenue would not challenge apple's claims about not owing Irish taxes on money in transit. though all evidence point to apple knowing full well that was not an indication that their tax sceme was legal.
now scale that up to billions of dollars, and the accountant is now swiss. we should fix laws first so that loopholes like that cannot exist.