Enter Warren on this side of the Atlantic.
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Sinn Fein finance spokesman Pearse Doherty said Apple made 104 billion euro of tax-free profits over 10 years from 2003 by using Irish-incorporated firms Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe to book sales outside the U.S. and move money into a “sort of untaxed Bermuda triangle”.
She ruled that, as a result, Apple must repay €13bn to the Irish State, while adding that the €13bn can also be claimed by other European countries where Apple traded.
In general, Ireland’s corporate tax rate is attractive in the European Union at 12.5 percent. Sinn Fein finance spokesman Pearse Doherty said Apple had operated “a sort of untaxed Bermuda Triangle” in Ireland following opinion polls that have shown majorities in favour of Apple paying the back taxes.
“The fundamental point here is Apple unambiguously was trying to avoid taxes and it was doing it in a dishonest way, with complicity from the Irish government, pretending that the money, the profits, the billions of profits it was making, were really being originated in some Irish company that was registered in cyberspace and therefore did not have to pay any taxes”. When a company like that comes to a country like Ireland it is only natural that the Government will do everything that it can to get it to stay. Such a “sweetheart deal”, the European Union alleges, is illegal. In the name of competition, nobody is really allowed to compete.
Warren says Apple paid a tax rate of 1% or lower. For more than thirty years, Apple has taken the position that AOI has no tax residency, and AOI has not filed a corporate tax return in the past 5 years. Why aren’t all those “sweetheart deals” also illegal?
“Awareness at a board level regarding worldwide tax structures and associated tax and reputational risk grew on the back of that”, said Kevin Doyle, global tax partner at BDO, referring also to an investigative reporting series that heightened the global debate on corporate tax avoidance.
“We have the leverage to tighten our tax code because these companies want what America offers: the world’s wealthiest consumers, the world’s best work force, the world’s most reliable legal system and the world’s deepest capital markets”, the senator wrote. The EC had treated Irish shell companies as being used for an artificial allocation of profits while Apple’s designation of these entities as stateless with no tax residencies, appears to have been a breach of Irish law. The stockholders then pay another tax on the dividends they receive from that same stream of already taxed income.
But, now, Sen.Chuck Shumer, D-N.Y., calls the EU’s demand for billions of dollars from Apple “a cheap money grab”.
Multinationals and their lobbyists on Capitol Hill are pushing U.S. Congress to give them favorable deals even as the U.S. Department of the Treasury finalizes reporting requirements for American corporations with offices in foreign countries that could help expose their “jaw-dropping variety of tax-dodging schemes”, Warren wrote.
But it is furious about the ruling, with CEO Tim Cook branding it as “maddening”.
Significantly, however, the committee did not accuse the company of breaking any laws. And that is the real key here. No other region in the world can deliver that kind of benefits. Did they actually break any laws?
But other Irish lawmakers have argued the iPhone and iPad maker should be made to pay the tax bill.
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They didn’t. That should tell you something. It launched a diplomatic offensive in 2013 to reject the USA senators’ accusations that it acted as a tax haven for companies like Apple, issuing its embassies from Beijing to Buenos Aires with rebuttal points.
