“I don’t think they’ve been illegal in what they’ve done, it’s the tax system as it’s set up”, said Alliance member John Halligan, a junior minister who does not sit at cabinet.
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“There are very, very few figures in the public domain. Right now the ball is in the hands of Apple and Ireland”. Well, of course more money would be in European citizens’ pockets if loopholes and anemic tax deals hadn’t been deemed perfectly acceptable in Europe, and of course major corporations such as Apple can afford to pay.
The European Commission’s ruling that Apple should pay 13 billion euros of back-dated taxes could help Ireland reduce its debt significantly but may undermine the Irish government in the process, Standard & Poor’s told Reuters on Thursday. “This is a decision based on the facts of the case”, she said. “Using the Commission’s theory, every company in Ireland and across Europe is suddenly at risk of being subjected to taxes under laws that never existed”.
Apple boss Tim Cook has branded his company’s 13 billion euro (£11 billion) bill for unpaid taxes in Europe as “political crap”, maddening and untrue.
Former US senator Carl Levin, a Democrat who oversaw Congressional investigations into corporate tax avoidance, said in a statement on Tuesday that European authorities were understandably attempting to recoup taxes that the US Internal Revenue Service had failed to collect and that Apple wrongly avoided.
“The issue is if they book it to a subsidiary in Ireland should there be an Irish tax?” The commissioner said: “The Apple case is about profits made by sale in Europe so obviously it is a question of tax being paid in Europe”. The Commission also has two ongoing in-depth investigations into concerns that tax rulings in Luxembourg for Amazon and McDonald’s may give rise to state aid issues.
Ireland has said they plan to appeal the Commission’s ruling and Apple confirmed that they will do the same.
The Apple decision may also complicate struggling EU-US talks on what would be the world’s biggest free trade deal, meant to be completed before US President Barack Obama steps down in January. The world’s largest economies have agreed to work together to fight the erosion of the tax base through corporate offshoring of profits, and USA lawmakers have labored for years, unsuccessfully thus far, to craft a bipartisan tax overhaul.
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The Commission’s move is “unprecedented and it has serious, wide-reaching implications”, Cook added. Leaks and public hearings on tax deals had created pressure among voters for the European Union to act in 2013, he said, while the size of the companies targeted gave them clout with political leaders, too. We are confident that the Commission’s order will be reversed… So, while Apple played according to the rules, and from Ireland’s standpoint as well as Apple’s this is a great deal-Ireland isn’t the European Union and the deal screws other European Union countries. Slamming a company with a giant tax bill – years after the fact – sends exactly the wrong message to job creators on both sides of the Atlantic.
