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Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

> If they want to reform tax law, then it should be forward facing, not trying to reverse previous established policies.

The EU argument was that Ireland's "previous established policies" were against EU treaty, and so the (alleged) special deal that IE gave Apple should be considered annulled since it was invalid from the day it was signed.

> On this basis, the Commission concluded that the tax rulings issued by Ireland endorsed an artificial allocation of Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe's sales profits to their "head offices", where they were not taxed. As a result, the tax rulings enabled Apple to pay substantially less tax than other companies, which is illegal under EU state aid rules.

> This decision does not call into question Ireland's general tax system or its corporate tax rate.

* https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_16_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_agai...

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> The EU argument was that Ireland's "previous established policies" were against EU treaty, and so the (alleged) special deal that IE gave Apple should be considered annulled since it was invalid from the day it was signed.

Yet the EU sat on this for 12+ years allowing this agreement to continue. If they felt this was a concern, they should have addressed it in 2004... or any year between.

Remember when you were a kid, and your parents told you to clean your room last week, and they gave you a whole week to catch up? And then oddly, you were still on the hook even though they waited a whole week before grounding you?

Same principle. Statutes of limitation exist for a reason.

As I see it, apple didnt fail to clean its room. It was told not to clean it by the parent, who then got yelled at by the grandparent, and now a week later apple's being grounded by the parent.

Ireland is the one that broke the treaty, not Apple. Apple played correctly within the rules & scope available to it, and is being retroactively told that those rules, in fact, did not exist, though certainly every other rule does exist, except for those that might not, depending on our decisions in twenty years.

> it was invalid from the day it was signed

Shouldn't then Ireland pay it (or act as if it was paid, and paid whatever it would have paid from it to the EU budget).

> or act as if it was paid, and paid whatever it would have paid from it to the EU budget

Yeah, lets treat this as a fine and fine them $1 for every million it cost the other EU members. Lessons learned: you can get away with everything if you are just bold enough.

By agreements they signed they are supposed to collect the taxes in a fair manner, so requiring them to collect the taxes they didn't seems to be the least they can be required to do. That would also have the side effect of making every company think twice about using an EU country as a tax haven.

Seems like there's a sovereignty issue here. If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland, and they sign off on it, are you done? Why do you have to care what other deals they have made with other parties?

Or is nothing Ireland does binding, until someone else with real power has counter-signed it?

All international agreements represent a sacrifice the "highest authority" makes, setting their reputation and future ability to make agreements as collateral. The "highest authority" further diluted its own authority by making a corporate deal that went against previously made agreements with its actual peers (states), damaging the collateral it already put up.

Whatever ideas you have about the state needing to have the highest authority in the land, if we follow that through by not holding them accountable for agreements made, then that actually substantially dilutes the power the state can have.

If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland to access the entirety of the EU Single Market, then yes indeed you should care about EU laws. It's not like Apple is only selling iPhones in Ireland...

If you sign a deal with Nevada to sell products in the entirety of the United States, you expect federal laws to apply, don't you? Well, EU is not a federation like the Unites States, but it's half-way there. You cannot ignore Bruxelles when dealing with the Single Market, just like you cannot ignore federal laws when doing interstate commerce in the US.

I have found that EU is really something hard to grasp for non-European. And to be fair, for most Europeans too. If Ireland wants its sovereignty back it can exit the EU (and the Single Market) at any time. But then of course it won't be the gateway to the Single Market for American companies anymore...

But nobody in Nevada thinks that it is a country. And there is no pretence that its government is free to negotiate international matters (let alone run an army, have its own language, or even hold a referendum on abortion).

> hard to grasp for non-European. And to be fair, for most Europeans too

Yes, I think the degree to which this thing is a super-state (or at least claims to be one) not a trade club is not fully appreciated. Not least by the voters in whose name it was created. It's in some gray area between a federal state and a treaty, and cases like this are illuminating as to precisely what shade of gray.

Given how the Supreme Court decision on abortion has come under fire, I would argue that a lot of American citizens believe that Nevada should in fact be able to to hold a referendum on abortion...

About the EU, "The European Union is a unique economic and political union between 27 EU countries" [1] Who believes it's just a trade club? I'm born in France, grew up in France, and never thought of the EU as just a free trade zone. It's a weird belief to me, and obviously not one anchored in any kind of reality. But that might simply be because it hasn't been sold that way to French citizens, maybe Irish people were told otherwise?

But forget about the EU. When Apple setup its European headquarter in Ireland, it's to sell its goods in all of Europe, what we call the Single Market. The Single Market is not the EU. Apple could have set up its European headquarter in Iceland or Norway, countries that are outside of the EU, yet inside the Single Market. And the same European laws would still apply. These laws are not the rules of the EU, they are the rules of the trade club.

When you enter a member of the Single Market specifically with the purpose of selling to all the members of the club, you can't play dumb and claim you didn't know that the rules of the clubs applied to you.

If Ireland wants to leave the Single Market, it can do so freely. It could even leave the EU without leaving the Single Market if it so wishes, but the rules of the Single Market would then still apply. Trying to stay within the Single Market while ditching its rules is, as demonstrated very thoroughly by the UK, completely impossible.

[1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-in-brief_en#fro...

> * If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland, and they sign off on it, are you done? Why do you have to care what other deals they have made with other parties?*

When joining the EU, Ireland promised to have (tax) policies consistent with certain principles. The 'side-deal' with Apple alleged (according to the EU) broke those principles.

If Ireland doesn't want a higher authority looking over them they can leave the EU. This is one of the arguments made by the Leave side in UK Brexit: we don't want Brussels breathing down our necks.

> Seems like there's a sovereignty issue here.

Ireland signed on to the EU and several trade agreements before that. Until it quits these it is subject to their rules.

> If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland, and they sign off on it, are you done?

Any contract you sign in any country can be invalidated by a court.

> Ireland signed ... trade agreements ... is subject to their rules

Sure. If your employment contract prevents you from taking other work, you may be fired if you break this. You may also have signed up to binding arbitration by some weird court. But normally the 3rd party (your weekend employer, who did not sign) cannot be penalized.

That's what points out how much sovereignty has been given up by Ireland. It has signed up something much more than a trade deal. A foreign court can not just strike down laws it passes, but re-write them retrospectively a decade after the fact.

It is not a foreign court, it is the highest court in Ireland's legal system.

No law has been sturck down. No law has been rewritten. No law has been applied retroactively.

A deal was found to be illegal, based on the laws at the time, so was anulled (as any illegal deal would be).

This was appealed, and the court found that the facts of the case had been misinterperated (ie they're arguing about what counts as state aid, not whether state aid is illegal).

> it is the highest court in Ireland's legal system.

And not just Ireland's.

And that's what I'm saying. If your legal system is united to this degree into a larger framework, then that new thing is the locus of sovereignty. It is much more than a trade deal. (That doesn't mean it's wrong, or a good idea or a bad idea. But it's a big change.)

The highest authority in any modern deomcracy should be the rule of law.

What you're advocating for is despotism.

The rule of law is a nice aspiration, but it has limits on large-scale cases. For instance I'm sure these laws about illegal state aid could logically imply a conclusion that would result in (say) Airbus going bust. And if the judges ever tried this, the laws or the system would be changed to prevent it. Those with real power would not permit this outcome.

And I think cases like this €13bn tax bill are half way there. Did it really spend 12 years working its way through neutral courts, like some slow squabble over who inherits the family pizza parlor? Or was there a bit more political input now that the EU feels that US tech giants are a geopolitical threat, in a way that they didn't 12 years ago?

And so the sovereignty question is not just on whose soil the high court sits, and who writes the nice rules it officially follows. It's about who gets to decide which big cases to let slide, and which to go after.

> Shouldn't then Ireland pay it (or act as if it was paid, and paid whatever it would have paid from it to the EU budget).

The EU is not getting paid anything. The EU said that Apple should have paid Ireland more.

It's like the EU saying to Germany "we thing that you are giving an unfair tax advantage to BMW compared to Renault: you need to collect more taxes from them".

Your quotes are from the decision that was just overturned, ie, the commission was found to be wrong. The fact is those taxes were legal and not preferential state aid, as was just ruled.

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