Seems wrong that Ireland cheated the system to attract tech companies then also gets a huge payout.
It's supposed to work against them, as a chilling effect for any company trying to work EU states against each other for preferential treatment. I'm sure Ireland will argue that they'll offer any multi-billion multinational this sort of treatment, but that's really the point. The EU doesn't want a race to the bottom and if EU-local businesses are unable to leverage this sort of accounting break, it's a massive leg up for external businesses.
While this is a large lump, this fine covers a decade of accounts, and this final decision comes 32 quarters after the original fine. Each of those quarters could have paid this off from flat profit. They're doing okay.
Consider how the ruling says "Ireland had renounced tax revenue, which had given rise to a loss of State resources". This means many people living in Ireland got less government resources than they would have, including people like children and immigrants who did not have the right to vote so cannot be said to have been involved in the cheating, even though they are part of Ireland.
Legally speaking it's not a "payout" but "recovery of unlawful state aid."
No it doesn't. Ireland did this deal to benefit from it. What they lost from direct tax in one area they gained in others. Had Ireland not made this deal, it's unlikely it would have become the conduit for Apple profits from around the world.
The subject of the ruling contains "concerning tax rulings issued by Ireland in favour of Apple"
Just because a country has children and immigrants does not absolve it of criticism.
Utter nonsense.
Apple Ireland has more employees than Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden combined.
There are employment quotas for the tax arrangements.
And that's the problem right there. It's a constant race to the bottom between EU states where the EU taxpayers are the loosers and the corpos are the winners.
"The EU head office said that Ireland granted such lavish tax breaks to Apple that the company's effective corporate tax rate on its European profits dropped from 1 percent in 2003 to a mere 0.005 percent in 2014." https://apnews.com/article/apple-european-union-tech-b1575db...
Are you suggesting that Ireland did not benefit from this illegal deal?
Apple Ireland is home to Apples only self-operated manufacturing plant in the world employing ~6,000 people building iMacs to order by hand (lol). There are employment quotas to meet for the tax arrangements which is one example of how Ireland as a whole benefits.
Ireland is ranked 2nd with the highest GDP per capita in the world and they got there by being an unlawful tax haven benefiting as whole at the expense of others.
Can we write “search”? Google is hardly a usefull search engine anymore.
Where is your evidence? I quoted the court decision to support my position.
The very existence of revolving door politics is an example of how conflicts of interest can exist which favor those in power, to the overall detriment of the population.
Government officials and politicians are well aware there may be a cushy job for them with the big companies they once regulated, so long as those companies are happy with them.
Thus I again caution on using "Ireland" in a way which blurs the difference between those in Ireland who gained from unlawful state aid and those who gain from its return.
Nobody foresaw how things would pan out literally decades later.
It's like saying that you couldn't forsee a state law overriding a lower level region/county law.
Specifically for Ireland, we are the only EU member state that are obliged to hold public referendums on Treaties. Ratification of the Treaty in all other member states is decided upon by the states' national parliaments.
Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. That's why Article 116 exists. You don't know what you're talking about.
The Polish constitutional court OUTRIGHT ruled that EU law does not supercede national law. Thus, primacy of EU law is wholly rejected in Poland. https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/07/polish-court-rules-some-...
I could go on, but responding to Dunning-Kruger commentary is a Pyrrhic battle at best.
A case which questions the ability of EU to override Polish consistution. Did you establish that corporate tax law is a consistutional issue? And note that the decision the tribunal has made that redress for differences between EU law and Polish law will have to be handled by: leaving EU, changing the constitution or changing the EU law. I'm not sure Poland wants to push that.
At least read up on basics of how EU works if you're going to debate law.
So given the time value of money, Apple still has an unfair advantage?
From the original decision:
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1. Ireland shall recover the aid referred to in Article 1(1) from Apple Sales International.
2. Ireland shall recover the aid referred to in Article 1(2) from Apple Operations Europe.
3. The sums to be recovered shall bear interest from the date on which they were put at the disposal of the beneficiaries until their actual recovery.
4. The interest shall be calculated on a compound basis in accordance with Chapter V of Regulation (EC) No 794/2004.
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https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec/2017/1283/oj
Linked in https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
Rather than competing and reducing their tax rates countries like France prefer to moan, as politically they can’t be seen to favour big bad businesses.
This of course was no problem with the EEC where Germany, France and the other ex-colonial powers made out like bandits selling their coal and steel to Ireland and the CT being paid there.
Enter an English-language dominated SaaS economy from the 90s and they got caught out as they were more interested in domestic economic protectionism than dealing with the realities of a paradigm shift towards tech. We pivoted completely to an information economy and service based economy from a predominately agrarian one. Now have a look at the tech job market in 2024 in Dublin versus Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, Barcelona etc..
If any one of our EU or the other non EU countries were really dissatisfied with Ireland, they have the right to withdraw at any time.
That's primarily due to EU politics and support.
It is, however, economically nowhere even close to France or Germany, no matter how large you think the "tech job" market there is [0].
> If any one of our EU or the other non EU countries were really dissatisfied with Ireland, they have the right to withdraw at any time.
Who should withdraw from what?
[0] For the facts regarding economic strength, read this document by the central bank of Ireland. https://www.centralbank.ie/docs/default-source/publications/...
Germany has 20x our population, France is not far off it. Neither has anything close to the job market per capita in the IT and Services sector that Ireland has.
As for us dragging ourselves up, that has more to with our special relationship with the US. The EU were initially helpful with infrastructural development, access to a Common Market, and to drag us out of the Vatican Law era, but we gave up a huge amount of fishing rights to do so - massively enriching spain, portugal and france who had overfished their own waters. Note also we're not part of Schengen, but maintain a CTA (Common Travel Area) with the UK.
Eventually the EU took the legs out from under us in 2008 and forced us at gunpoint to bail out unsecured german bondholders to maintain the integrity of the Euro and prevent a contagion run on German Banks.
Irelands FDI sector was highly developed in the late 80s and combined with entities like Enterprise Ireland - ranked first in the world of venture capital investors by deal count in 2020 - hammered home the advantage via our highly-educated English speaking workforce and relatively low cost of living. Even now the number of investments completed by Enterprise Ireland was 42% more than its nearest competitor, French sovereign wealth fund Bpifrance.
> Germany has 20x our population, France is not far off it. Neither has anything close to the job market per capita in the IT and Services sector that Ireland has.
If you say so. And yet those employees are payed less.
These jobs exist because Ireland gave US companies large tax breaks and because it is an English-speaking country. Otherwise they would perhaps been based in the UK before Brexit.
It's good that Ireland attracts business, but encouraging tax dodging is not the way and this particular judgement is an opportunity to acknowledge this.
The commission has caved to political pressure and has fabricated a state aid case. The original general court ruling was unequivocal.
This ruling has been overturned by the ECJ - absolutely shamefully; with the entirety of their case is that Apple, and Apple alone were the beneficiary of state aid. That is demonstrably untrue.
Shouldn't they then keep their low-tax environment so that they can catch up to the rest of Europe ;)
That is completely wrong on multiple levels.
- You’re likely thinking of the double taxation treaties that follow the OECD model convention. These hardly get refreshed every 7 years. The German/Irish one is from 1962, the French/Irish one is from 1966, and the UK/Irish one from 1976. - The OECD’s BEPS multilateral tax treaty has now 85 state parties, including Ireland - There are other example of multilateral tax treaties, e.g. the Nordic countries have a multilateral double taxation treaty - There’s plenty of EU legislation around taxation covering predominantly VAT and excise duties bit also such details as the tax treatment of moving personal property between member countries or how royalty payments between associated companies are treated
OECD BEPs isn't a tax treaty per se, its a Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures.
Re: the Nordic treaty, Norway and Iceland aren't in the EU.
> The German/Irish one is from 1962
Correct. Here's the 1962 version https://www.revenue.ie/en/tax-professionals/documents/double...
and here are the last three UPDATED versions
https://www.revenue.ie/en/tax-professionals/documents/double...
https://www.revenue.ie/en/tax-professionals/documents/double...
https://www.revenue.ie/en/tax-professionals/documents/double...
Well, technically Malta also exists, but I imagine that not a lot of companies are looking to set up on a small island the size of Kansas City.
Germans and Americans wouldn't understand each other, even if they spoke the same culture. Their understanding of how life works, their worldview, their expectation of others, ...etc all of these are quite different. For example, a project is ongoing, but in the course of completing the todo list, it is apparent that a certain issue is going to prop up. An American would immediately jump on it, try to fix it and then make sure to boast about it at the next meaning to take the credit. A German would either ignore it completely because it is not part of his responsibilities or bring it up at the next meeting, but not before finishing the todo list as planned even if the last points are rendered obsolete by the emergence of this issue. And when the American starts presenting his solution at the meeting, the German will feel slighted and held out of the loop, and all sorts of confused that this guy acted so independently and out of line, without following procedure. Just an example. There are whole courses about the different corporate cultures and how people find it hard to work in different cultural environments.
I am sure the Americans prefer to work with the Irish who although they don't have the same culture, I never heard of major issues in communication between the those two cultures.