Tim Cook posted on Apple website: “We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals”.
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His comments came after the European Union ordered the USA -based firm to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes to Ireland plus billions more in interest. “We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to the government”.
CNBC added that the Irish government is also telling European Union bureaucrats half a continent away in Brussels that they “have no business telling Dublin how much they should tax companies”.
Apple Operations International, a subsidiary of Apple Inc, is seen in Hollyhill, Cork, in the south of Ireland August 30, 2016. Apple has had a manufacturing facility at Cork in Ireland since October 1980, its first foray into Europe.
The CEO of the most profitable company in the world said that the EC’s ruling would set a unsafe precedent that could impact companies throughout the EU. “Ireland is being picked on and this is unacceptable”, Cook was quoted as saying by the newspaper. Amazon and McDonald’s both have cases pending with the Commission over potentially underpaying taxes as well. In an open letter, Apple called the European Commission’s move “unprecedented, and it has serious, wide-reaching implications”. It is effectively proposing to replace Irish tax laws with a view of what the Commission thinks the law should have been.
The U.K. can now focus on how it can “participate in the single market as an outsider”, Bloomberg added, as the country will be free to set its own rules and avoid one of the most “consistent” characteristics of the European Union, “coming down hard on anything that smacks of state aid or unfair competition”. “It is about which government collects the money”.
Ireland also has an investment grade rating with Moody’s, Fitch and DBRS.
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He said: “You were encouraging tax avoidance, you knew it. you got a few jobs at the cost of stealing revenues away from countries around the world and that’s the kind of activity that has to be stopped”. “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”.
