To recap, the European Commission has ordered Apple to pay £11 billion in business tax and interest for late payments.
Advertisement
“There were many decisions over the years and there was a lot of hard discussions in Cabinet and everybody had to come out at the end of the day and defend the decision that was made collectively”.
Ireland announced it had chose to appeal the ruling on Friday, after finance minister Michael Noonan said he disagreed “profoundly” with the verdict, while Apple boss Tim Cook dubbed the decision “total political crap”.
The row over how much tax technology giant Apple should pay to the Irish government has triggered a new argument about sovereignty and a government’s right to set taxes within the European.
Brussels launched an inquiry three years ago into tax breaks that Ireland offered iPhone-maker Apple, in the latest of a series of anti-trust cases targeting major United States corporations that have also included Starbucks, McDonald΄s and Amazon.
“That is a matter for the Irish Government”, he said. In separate comments to Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 summit on Saturday, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Center for Tax Policy and Administration, called Apple’s tax planning “outrageous” but, like Juncker, said the decision was based on enforcing regulations.
The cabinet decision would still need to be endorsed by parliament next Wednesday. He claimed “no preferential treatment” had been dished out to Apple. Apple’s unusual tax structure involved companies which are tax resident nowhere and resulted in a tax rate of less than 1 percent. This ruling has seismic and entirely negative consequences for job creation in the future.
We haven’t seen one key point discussed.
There is a clear intention to emphasise the certainty of the tax code. Its corporate tax rate, 12.5 percent, is the lowest among major countries. Vestager refuted that claim and said the decision was based on the facts of the case.
Advertisement
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook, * a href=”http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/apple-boss-tim-cook-calls-tech-giants-13bn-irish-tax-bill-political-cp-1579104″ *described the ruling as “total political crap”, but France and Germany backed Brussels’ decision.
