Apple chief Tim Cook on Thursday slammed a European Commission ruling demanding the U.S. tech behemoth pay Ireland €13 billion in back-taxes as “political crap”, urging the Irish government to launch an appeal.
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“It’s maddening. It’s maddening and disappointing”, the Apple chief said.
“When you are accused of something that is so foreign to your values, it brings out an outrage in you”.
“It’s total political crap”, Cook said of the figure.
“I have been concerned that it reflected an attempt to reach into the US tax base to tax income that ought to be taxed in the United States”, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said at an event to discuss Washington’s position ahead of a meeting of the Group of 20 industrial nations in China next week.
Now the companies say they are ready to pay taxes on the money in the United States, just not at the current rate the USA government would assess.
“We have been committed to Ireland for 37 years; we have had a long-term romance together and I’m pretty confident the government will do the right thing and I think the right thing here is to stand up and fight”, Cook told RTE, speaking from California.
The investigation found that Apple routed nearly all the taxable profits from European sales to two Irish-based subsidiaries, which shifted the money to a “head office” that had no employees or facilities and was not taxed in any country.
Mr Cook said the numbers had been set out in the company’s quarterly accounts and that Apple paid 400 million USA dollars corporation tax in Ireland in 2014, another 400 million United States dollars of similarly classed tax in the U.S. and set aside billions more for tax bills in America that year. “Ireland is being picked on and this is unacceptable”, Cook was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Apple is just the latest US company to be targeted.
Another US firm, coffee chain Starbucks, was ordered to repay up to 30 million euros to the Netherlands and a unit of Italy’s Fiat must hand a similar sum to Luxembourg.
“By forcing member countries to collect taxes from those US-based firms. the European Union is trying to break the cycle of tax competition that has largely benefited those USA multinationals”. “It lacks any level of fairness”.
He says Apple actually paid $400 million to Ireland in the same year and believes it was the largest taxpayer in the country that year. The company opened its first factory there in 1980 and is breaking ground on an $800-million data center. It was the commission’s view that Ireland was responsible for collecting tax on 60 per cent of Apple’s world-wide profits for a decade.
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“The US should reform its tax system”, Jenifer McCloskey, director of government affairs at the Information Technology Industry Council, a powerful tech industry lobby, told AFP.
