He went on: “When you are accused of something that is so foreign to your values, it brings out an outrage in you”.
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The European Commission says Ireland illegally provided State aid to Apple by not collecting taxes owed by the USA tech giant over a decade.
Mr Cook rejected the Brussels audit which found the company’s tax arrangements enabled it to pay a tax rate of as little as 0.005% on its European profits in 2014.
Cook said Apple was committed to expanding its operations in Ireland despite the ruling.
“It’s a false number, I have no idea where the number came from”, he said. “In the year that the Commission says we paid that tax figure, we actually paid $400m”. The EU said this week that Apple has to pay back $14.5 billion worth of tax it avoided as a result of deals it struck with Ireland. She questioned how anyone might think that Apple’s 2014 Irish tax rate of 0.005 percent was fair.
On Tuesday, after a almost 3-year-long investigation, the European Commission ruled that the tax benefits accorded to the USA tech giant in Ireland flouted the bloc’s stringent rules against state aid, and were thus illegal.
In a separate interview on Thursday with Irish state broadcaster RTE, Cook said the European Union decision was “maddening” and that he was very assertive that his appeal would be successful.
In addition, we paid $400 million of current United States taxes on those profits, bringing total current taxes paid to $800 million. In this vein, responding to the question of whether Apple has anything to apologize for or if it did anything wrong, Cook said succinctly “no, we haven’t done anything wrong”.
He said: “It’s total political c**p”.
Cook concluded his statements with a quip of strength, “we are not going to let an invalid ruling – a politically-based ruling – affect our commitment to Ireland”, the Financial Times reports. The money Apple owes stems from what’s referred to as the “Double Irish” loophole. He added that the decision is “invalid” and that neither Ireland nor Apple “did anything wrong”. And I think that [anti-US sentiment] is one reason why we could have been targeted. Apple, Ireland and the USA all agree on this principle.
“We now have 6,000 people”.
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“The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws and upend the global tax system in the process”, the company said.
