As Ireland are still saying, this €13bn (plus interest) is going to work against them.
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.
While I largely agree, I don't think there is any fine involved; it is just a requirement for Ireland to collect taxes that the ECJ says Apple should have paid. Hence not a fine.
I think you should be cautious about saying "Ireland cheated the system". The onus is placed more directly on the Irish tax authority, and then more broadly the government, and then more broadly the voting population, and only then the entire population.
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."
> This means many people living in Ireland got less government resources than they would have
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.
Because getting even <1% of Apple's, Google's, $FANGs EU wide tax revenue is a lot better than getting 0% of that revenue if they were to set their HQs in another EU country that would give them and even sweeter tax deal.
And that's the problem right there. It's a constant race to the bottom between EU states where the EU taxpayers are the loosers and the corpos are the winners.
While <1% is correct it's over two magnitudes too large. Saying <0.01% would be more informative.
"The EU head office said that Ireland granted such lavish tax breaks to Apple that the company's effective corporate tax rate on its European profits dropped from 1 percent in 2003 to a mere 0.005 percent in 2014." https://apnews.com/article/apple-european-union-tech-b1575db...
Apple Ireland has over 60 open positions for roles like Machine Leaning or Data Analytics while similar sized countries like Finland, Lithuania, Croatia, Denmark, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary have 0.
Apple Ireland is home to Apples only self-operated manufacturing plant in the world employing ~6,000 people building iMacs to order by hand (lol). There are employment quotas to meet for the tax arrangements which is one example of how Ireland as a whole benefits.
No idea, that doesn't matter though because if Ireland didn't give these massive unlawful tax deals then it wouldn't be a major tech hub for large tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.. and that 13b$ tax bill wouldn't exist in the first place.
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.
> What they lost from direct tax in one area they gained in others.
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.
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.
All tax treaties and agreements between countries (including intra-EU) are bilateral country to country agreements. Most are refreshed every 3-7 years based on OECD (or EU) recommended standards. Ireland's laws and treatment are 100% compliant.
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.
> All tax treaties and agreements between countries (including intra-EU) are bilateral country to country agreements.
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
How could we be? We're not a post-colonial power like France or Germany who spent years exploiting the African continent in egregious human rights violations. It is literally only since 2021 that we have reached our pre-English Genocide population levels of 1851
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/ireland-popula...
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 was never a significant colonial power and did not extract much value from them. Especially not compared to Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands or Belgium.
> 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.
So according to you everyone is wrong, all the courts, all the other EU countries (which unjustly are wealthier than Ireland due to colonialism), the commission and the court and of course the decision taken by it.
That's not how the EU works. To give just one major example, our constitution regularly overrules EU law - Ireland has to go to referendum for Treaties - e.g. The Lisbon Treaty.
No, no it doesn't. The primacy of EU law is completely negated in a number of fairly basic instances - the common market first and foremost.
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.
Why are you talking about Poland in Irish case now? :)
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.
"The law in the EU is written the France and Germany."; that is an overt oversimplification. Obviously France and Germany have more influence in the EU than other member states, but it is by no means a monopoly.
Ireland has a pretty big advantage for getting big American companies to settle there since it's the only place in EU where English is the official language.
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.
It's not just the language. It's also the culture. In fact I would say the culture is even more important.
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.
