Which secret sweetheart deals does Luxembourg have?
The secrecy and exclusivity were central to the judgement. The EU requires a level playing field for all companies, which is why individual governments striking secret tax deals not available to all companies are seen as an illegal thing.
I bet if Ireland had opened the same tax deal they did to Apple, to all companies this would not even have been a matter for the courts.
The problem was not about the tax level, nor the inter-state competition. The problem was that it was _not_ a free and fair competition. The tax deal was not offered to all companies. Ireland secretly did this to only select companies, and it therefore crossed the threshold into [secret and illegal] state aid.
That's... literally how every company in the EU operates. If Volkswagen, incorporated in Germany, sells a car in Poland, they're not required to pay a corresponding sliver of their net profits to the Polish exchequer. It all stays in Germany.
VAT is a tax paid by the consumer, not the manufacturer. It's collected at the point of sale by the retailer and passed on by them to the local tax authority.
VAT is physically paid by businesses in EU.
At the end of the day it's a tax on final business to customer transaction (like sale tax). It's levied on a transaction. Saying one party pays it but the other doesn't is meaningless. It's added to the transaction and then collected by the business and transferred to government.
You are correct in essence but that is not exactly how it works.
VAT is paid on the gross margin on each transaction. It only looks like the end user is the only one to pay because for that transaction the gross margin is the whole of the price. Car makers are to a large extent assemblers of ready made parts so some, admittedly small, VAT is certainly paid at various points in the supply chain.
Yeah this theoretical half-reading of wikipedia always leaves out the practical considerations.
This level playing field lasts right up to the point where each individual government of the Eurozone is mandated to cover the losses of their private sectors, including banking. The days of Germany dictating to their neighbours how their countries should be run are over outside of the ECB and the Euro. If they have a grievance then they can go through the EU courts like Germany did with the Apple case.
Big countries signed up to a common market without tax harmonisation and they would leave if it wasn't working for them, just like the UK did.
Guess which country was forced to bail out Europe's banks and unsecured bondholders in the last crisis? We also don’t benefit by the setting of ECB rates like Germany does, and we're going to get slammed as they rebalance their books following pandemic social payments.
Ireland gets the blame for Apple not paying its fair share of taxes but the issues is entirely a US one: Apple is a US company, yet the US won't force Apple to pay taxes on its foreign earnings. In contrast, if you're a US citizen who resides elsewhere, you're still expected to pay US taxes...
In France the statutory corporate tax rate is 33.3% while the actual effective tax rate is lower than Ireland's 12.5% at 8.2%.
Luxembourg has a statutory rate of 22.5% but an effective rate of just 4.1%.
The secrecy and exclusivity were central to the judgement. The EU requires a level playing field for all companies, which is why individual governments striking secret tax deals not available to all companies are seen as an illegal thing.
I bet if Ireland had opened the same tax deal they did to Apple, to all companies this would not even have been a matter for the courts.