Tim Cook told Irish state network RTE in an interview broadcast Thursday that repatriation should occur next year as profits from 2014 are repatriated. The two have “gone through potholes, but we stuck together”. 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”.
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Cook also rejected allegation by EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager that Apple had paid just 0.005 percent tax in Ireland in 2014.
“It’s total political crap”, he said.
“They just picked a number from I don’t know where”, Cook continued.
Cook told the newspaper that bias against multinationals from the United States may have been a factor in the decision to impose the bill. Austria welcomed EU’s decision on ruling against Apple and asking the company to pay 13 billion euro in the form of back-taxes.
“It’s a false number, I have no idea where the number came from”, he said.
“The tax treatment in Ireland enabled Apple to avoid taxation on nearly all profits generated by sales of Apple products in the entire European Union single market”. Many executives, including Apple, have said that rate is unfair.
The EC has said that the payments were avoided as part of a subsidy for Apple from the Irish government, provided as an inducement to persuade the company to invest in the country. “But on this one, literally 100pc of the comments are in agreement”.
The Commission’s charges have “no basis in fact or in law”, Cook wrote in an open letter to Apple customers on Tuesday. From Apple’s vantage point, the Commission is trying to “rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws, and upend the worldwide tax system in the process”. Doing it this way doesn’t seem like the right approach to me. “There should be a public discussion about it”.
Vestager has said she will meet US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew in Washington in September to further discuss the Apple case.
The EU no doubt sees itself as standing up to big-footed US tech behemoths, but there’s a risk that this strategy could backfire badly, and cause the big four to invest their billions elsewhere. “In that year, we paid $400 million to Ireland, and that amount of money was based on the statutory Irish income tax rate of 12.5 percent”.
“We paid $400m to Ireland, we paid $400 (million) to the USA and we provisioned several billion dollars for the USA for payment as soon as we repatriate it and right now I forecast that repatriation to occur next year”, Cook said.
“What I feel strongly about is that this decision was politically based, of that I’m very confident”. But Apple has also long suggested it wasn’t considering moving any of that money back soon-until there was corporate tax code changes in the usa that would make such a move less costly.
“It’s like playing a sports game and winning the championship and then finding out the goals are worth less than you thought they were”, he told RTE.
The tech firm is pressing ahead with plans for expansion in Cork.
“We are going forward, absolutely”, he said. “We are completely committed to Ireland”.
“We’ve been spending a lot of money on building out a large location in Cork”, said Mr Cook.
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“It’s a very deep relationship”. Every time I go there it brings me such joy.
