This is not what happened. Read here a description of Apple's scheme.
The problem was not that Ireland had a tax rate of 12.5% whereas France had 30%. The EC said explicitly that they did not investigate this. The problem was that Apple was not paying Ireland even this 12.5%, it was paying less than 1%. And this is illegal, Ireland must charge all companies the same tax.
How is the British government demaning companies to pay tax in the UK? I hadn't heard of it.
Let's see what Theresa May will do. I simply do not know whether she is corrupt or not. What I was sure was that David "my father had millions in Panama" Cameron would never do anything against tax havens.
Why is step one forcing standard corporate tax rates? This is never going to happen anyway, the EU member states will not give up their taxing authority.
Note that this is unrelated to transfer pricing, as there is only one subsidiary involved here, Apple Sales International. What is necessary to end this scam is simply to require sales made in Germany to be reported as sales made in Germany. Very easy to do, if there is political will for it. In this way Ireland can set its corporate tax rate to zero, and it will only bankrupt itself.
And thanks for pointing out the first positive aspect of Brexit: the UK was who was blocking every attempt of the EU to deal with corporate tax dodging. Now that they are out (politically speaking) I think we are finally going to get something done.
You are not actually believing Apple's fiction that its subsidiaries are separate companies with their own revenue and expenses.
And this is not even how Apple has structured itself. There is no Apple Germany. There is a company based in Ireland, called Apple Sales International, that buys phones from the manufacturers in China, and makes payments to Apple headquarters in the US to fund R&D. When you buy an iPhone in Germany you are actually buying it directly from Apple Sales International, so there is no German revenue or profit to be talked about. Apple Sales International, on its turn, makes a healthy profit, which is taxed at less than 1% by the Irish government.
All this legal fiction is completely irrelevant. iPhones are actually sold in Germany, and Apple does make a healthy profit from them, otherwise it wouldn't bother setting up operations there. And this profit should be taxed in Germany, as it would be if our politicians were not corrupted to the core. Instead it goes to Ireland, and from there to some tax haven in a tropical island.
Is this a serious question? You seriously don't know how Germany is losing out? Let me spell it out for you: Apple reported 50 billion dollars revenue in Europe in 2015. Since Germany's GDP is about 20% of Europe's GDP, let's say that 20% of this revenue came from Germany (of course, Apple will not reveal the true numbers), so 10 billion dollars. I guess Apple's profit margin is a fabulous 15%, so 1.5 billion dollars. Germany's corporate tax is about 30%, which would make 450 million dollars. So this is what Germany is losing out. 450 million dollars. Every year.
And come on, do you seriously believe that the G8 would have any difficulty in stamping out these tax scams if it wanted to? It knows Apple's revenue, and it knows Apple's expenses. The only reason it falls for this creative accounting is because it wants to. As the US just made perfectly clear, it is radically against Apple paying any tax.
You are talking as if Apple was simply paying their taxes innocently as instructed by the Irish government. Maybe you just don't know how the scheme worked; read here a description, it is concise and straightforward. It is tax fraud pure and simple. And it was obviously designed by Apple together with the Irish government. There is just no way that this scam would just be generally allowed by the Irish government and Apple just took advantage of it. If this were the case no corporation in Ireland would ever pay tax. This was a scam designed by Apple, for Apple. And you should also take into account that Apple's revenue is larger than Ireland's GDP. The corrupting influence of such a huge amount of money is hard to overstate.
Now, about the EC's powers: it is a simple matter of fact that they can make the states recover illegal state aid, as it had done several times in the past (which you would know if you had read the link I sent you), and it is a simple matter of fact that the EC can punish Ireland if it defies its ruling. It is just inconceivable that Ireland will tell the EC to go pound sand. What Ireland will do is appeal to the ECJ, which will deny its appeal, and then Ireland will comply with the ruling. Otherwise it risks economic sanctions.
It is true that the EU has no taxation power, but this doesn't mean that the member states are allowed to use their sovereign taxation powers to fuck each other over. Otherwise your nightmare scenario of the EU falling apart from "beggar thy neighbour" policies would be true.
Have you even read what I wrote? You completely missed my points.
I guess you are so angry because you believe this is a EU vs US thing. It is not. Several European companies have been fined as well for exactly this same scam. Fiat, BP, InBev, among others.
And frankly, you shouldn't be angry at the EU to make Apple pay its taxes. You should be angry at the US for letting Apple get away with tax dodging. Last time I heard it had about 200 billion dollars hidden in tax havens.
Weird as it may sound, they are punishing Ireland. By giving them 14.5 billion euros. The point is, Ireland was giving illegal state aid to Apple, gaining an unfair competitive advantage over other countries. By making Apple pay back taxes Ireland's advantage is negated, making the playing field level again. This is why Ireland is fighting against this ruling, it wants to preserve its reputation as a tax haven and keep attracting tax-dodging companies.
I find it unbelievable that the other EU conuntries allow this to happen. Why? it's not as if Ireland has any political/military/economic power to force the other countries to accept this rotten deal. Germany, for example, lost billions of euros in tax revenue. For nothing.
I suspect it was Britain who was lobbying behind the scenes to keep the scam going on.
To spell it out: Ireland was charging Apple the 12.5% tax on sales made in Ireland. The sales made in the rest of Europe were not taxed. At all. So Ireland was simply robbing the other EU countries of their tax money. Stopping this scam is precisely what we need the EU comission to do.
And you think exiting the EU would be the proper answer to this? Go ahead, please. Let's see how Apple likes to stay in Ireland without access to the European market.
...the countries stepped forward with tax breaks that were against the intent but not the legal structure of the EU.
This is not true. What Ireland did was patently against EU law, violating the no state aid rule. And this is what the Comission decided today, that this sweetheart deal configured state aid because it was not available to all companies, it was only for some select few.
And you are being disingenuous by suggesting that Apple did nothing wrong. The deal was obviously negotiated directly between Ireland and Apple. And to suggest that Apple didn't know this was illegal, come on. They can afford some pretty good lawyers, you know.
This all, of course, without mentioning the massive scam that is establishing itself in Ireland in the first place. Apple pretends to make no profit in any EU country, all of it goes to Ireland. But this is apparently legal.
This argument is insane. So independently of whatever tax fraud Apple makes, it is wrong to punish them for it, because the stock price will be hit? Tough luck, maybe you shouldn't buy shares of a tax-dodging company in the first place.
I spoke once to a engineer that built motors for ships. His problem was that the motors were just too big to be transported from where he was (Bavaria) to where the ships were being built (Hamburg). They just didn't fit in the roads between these two places. So he had to build only the "small" motors (four meters high, ten meters long), while the really big stuff was built in China and shipped by ship (or just used for ships built also in China).
This Zeppelin would be the perfect solution for him. The carrying capacity is still too low (10 tons), as the big motors weight on the order of 100 tons, but I don't see any difficulty in scaling this up.
And this is exactly why it will be strongly fought against.
To give a concrete example, in the last presidential elections in Austria the neonazi party FPÖ won in the polling booths, but lost in the postal votes. Their answer to that? Forbid postal voting, of course! Who uses it the most are university students that are away from their hometown, and have very little sympathy for the FPÖ.
I can see that people would be touchy about GMO organisms reproducing in the wild; just look at the comments here, people are already up in arms against a sterile GMO.
But why is it a harder genetic engineering problem? The technique used here was including a gene that would express a protein that stops the expression of other genes, stopping the descendants from developing. Why can't we simply include this gene in the X chromosome, so that only female descendants don't develop? Or include a gene that stops the expression of genes that exist only in the X chromosome?
Also, there is literally no way that the spread of Zika will stop, so efforts like these are silly.
Care to explain why? If we reduce the population of mosquitoes enough Zika will not spread. It is as simple as that.
And come on, there exist no animal whose diet consists exclusively of Aedes Aegypti. If we eliminate it, they will just eat other mosquitoes instead. It is not as if there is any lack of mosquitoes in the wild.
Nice. So you live somewhere without mosquitoes, and are telling from your golden throne that the people suffering from Zika, dengue, and yellow fever should do nothing and accept their suffering in order to not subject your royal highness to any imaginable risk?
Luckily the government of Brazil doesn't give a shit about what you think and it is spreading GMO mosquitoes all over the country.
This is something that a field trial can easily tell us. But I would bet that whathever tetracycline there is in our waterways it is not nearly enough to allow the mosquitos to survive.
Asexual reproduction would be one way to avoid being killed. There might be other recessive traits that also might surface.
It is obvious that asexual reproduction would be a way to avoid being killed. What I asked is how that could possibly evolve in Aedes aegypti. Are you suggesting that there already exist some female mosquitos that reproduce parthenogenetically, and that they will take over the species once the sexually reproducing ones die off? This is just impossible. Asexual reproduction is a complex adaptation, it doesn't just happen.
I think there is a widespread misconception that DNA is some kind of magic box that can do anything, and that we have no idea how it works. It is not magic. It cannot do everything. And we do know a lot about it.
And you are failing to take into account that the screwworm has been eradicated from some regions via a sterile male technique without any frankenstein appearing.
Are you stupid or did you just choose to ignore my entire post? It was not that long.
I asked how the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication could possibly lead to asexual reproduction. You answered how could resistance to eradication evolve in the first place.
What's wrong about that? Even if that happens we will have transformed Aedes Aegypti into a species that can only reproduce near chicken factories. That is a much better situation than what we have know, as it currently reproduces very well in densely populated urban centres.
If we are unlucky, the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication also gives this new mosquito some even more obnoxious trait like the ability to asexually reproduce, swarm, and kill its host.
Care to explain how this could possibly happen? The GMO mosquitos express a protein whose effect is to stop other genes from expressing. How could this lead to the ability of asexually reproducing?
Well, Aedes aegypti is an invase species, so its extinction would probably just lead to the recovery of the native mosquito populations. But which "insect with worse properties" do you have in mind? Aedes aegypti is as bad as it gets.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not what happened. Read here a description of Apple's scheme.
The problem was not that Ireland had a tax rate of 12.5% whereas France had 30%. The EC said explicitly that they did not investigate this. The problem was that Apple was not paying Ireland even this 12.5%, it was paying less than 1%. And this is illegal, Ireland must charge all companies the same tax.
How is the British government demaning companies to pay tax in the UK? I hadn't heard of it.
Let's see what Theresa May will do. I simply do not know whether she is corrupt or not. What I was sure was that David "my father had millions in Panama" Cameron would never do anything against tax havens.
Why is step one forcing standard corporate tax rates? This is never going to happen anyway, the EU member states will not give up their taxing authority.
Note that this is unrelated to transfer pricing, as there is only one subsidiary involved here, Apple Sales International. What is necessary to end this scam is simply to require sales made in Germany to be reported as sales made in Germany. Very easy to do, if there is political will for it. In this way Ireland can set its corporate tax rate to zero, and it will only bankrupt itself.
And thanks for pointing out the first positive aspect of Brexit: the UK was who was blocking every attempt of the EU to deal with corporate tax dodging. Now that they are out (politically speaking) I think we are finally going to get something done.
You are not actually believing Apple's fiction that its subsidiaries are separate companies with their own revenue and expenses.
And this is not even how Apple has structured itself. There is no Apple Germany. There is a company based in Ireland, called Apple Sales International, that buys phones from the manufacturers in China, and makes payments to Apple headquarters in the US to fund R&D. When you buy an iPhone in Germany you are actually buying it directly from Apple Sales International, so there is no German revenue or profit to be talked about. Apple Sales International, on its turn, makes a healthy profit, which is taxed at less than 1% by the Irish government.
All this legal fiction is completely irrelevant. iPhones are actually sold in Germany, and Apple does make a healthy profit from them, otherwise it wouldn't bother setting up operations there. And this profit should be taxed in Germany, as it would be if our politicians were not corrupted to the core. Instead it goes to Ireland, and from there to some tax haven in a tropical island.
Is this a serious question? You seriously don't know how Germany is losing out? Let me spell it out for you: Apple reported 50 billion dollars revenue in Europe in 2015. Since Germany's GDP is about 20% of Europe's GDP, let's say that 20% of this revenue came from Germany (of course, Apple will not reveal the true numbers), so 10 billion dollars. I guess Apple's profit margin is a fabulous 15%, so 1.5 billion dollars. Germany's corporate tax is about 30%, which would make 450 million dollars. So this is what Germany is losing out. 450 million dollars. Every year.
And come on, do you seriously believe that the G8 would have any difficulty in stamping out these tax scams if it wanted to? It knows Apple's revenue, and it knows Apple's expenses. The only reason it falls for this creative accounting is because it wants to. As the US just made perfectly clear, it is radically against Apple paying any tax.
You are talking as if Apple was simply paying their taxes innocently as instructed by the Irish government. Maybe you just don't know how the scheme worked; read here a description, it is concise and straightforward. It is tax fraud pure and simple. And it was obviously designed by Apple together with the Irish government. There is just no way that this scam would just be generally allowed by the Irish government and Apple just took advantage of it. If this were the case no corporation in Ireland would ever pay tax. This was a scam designed by Apple, for Apple. And you should also take into account that Apple's revenue is larger than Ireland's GDP. The corrupting influence of such a huge amount of money is hard to overstate.
Now, about the EC's powers: it is a simple matter of fact that they can make the states recover illegal state aid, as it had done several times in the past (which you would know if you had read the link I sent you), and it is a simple matter of fact that the EC can punish Ireland if it defies its ruling. It is just inconceivable that Ireland will tell the EC to go pound sand. What Ireland will do is appeal to the ECJ, which will deny its appeal, and then Ireland will comply with the ruling. Otherwise it risks economic sanctions.
It is true that the EU has no taxation power, but this doesn't mean that the member states are allowed to use their sovereign taxation powers to fuck each other over. Otherwise your nightmare scenario of the EU falling apart from "beggar thy neighbour" policies would be true.
Have you even read what I wrote? You completely missed my points.
I guess you are so angry because you believe this is a EU vs US thing. It is not. Several European companies have been fined as well for exactly this same scam. Fiat, BP, InBev, among others.
And frankly, you shouldn't be angry at the EU to make Apple pay its taxes. You should be angry at the US for letting Apple get away with tax dodging. Last time I heard it had about 200 billion dollars hidden in tax havens.
Weird as it may sound, they are punishing Ireland. By giving them 14.5 billion euros. The point is, Ireland was giving illegal state aid to Apple, gaining an unfair competitive advantage over other countries. By making Apple pay back taxes Ireland's advantage is negated, making the playing field level again. This is why Ireland is fighting against this ruling, it wants to preserve its reputation as a tax haven and keep attracting tax-dodging companies.
I find it unbelievable that the other EU conuntries allow this to happen. Why? it's not as if Ireland has any political/military/economic power to force the other countries to accept this rotten deal. Germany, for example, lost billions of euros in tax revenue. For nothing.
I suspect it was Britain who was lobbying behind the scenes to keep the scam going on.
You are apparently completely ignorant of what Apple's tax arrangement was. Please read the statement of the European Comission.
To spell it out: Ireland was charging Apple the 12.5% tax on sales made in Ireland. The sales made in the rest of Europe were not taxed. At all. So Ireland was simply robbing the other EU countries of their tax money. Stopping this scam is precisely what we need the EU comission to do.
And you think exiting the EU would be the proper answer to this? Go ahead, please. Let's see how Apple likes to stay in Ireland without access to the European market.
This is not true. What Ireland did was patently against EU law, violating the no state aid rule. And this is what the Comission decided today, that this sweetheart deal configured state aid because it was not available to all companies, it was only for some select few.
And you are being disingenuous by suggesting that Apple did nothing wrong. The deal was obviously negotiated directly between Ireland and Apple. And to suggest that Apple didn't know this was illegal, come on. They can afford some pretty good lawyers, you know.
This all, of course, without mentioning the massive scam that is establishing itself in Ireland in the first place. Apple pretends to make no profit in any EU country, all of it goes to Ireland. But this is apparently legal.
This argument is insane. So independently of whatever tax fraud Apple makes, it is wrong to punish them for it, because the stock price will be hit? Tough luck, maybe you shouldn't buy shares of a tax-dodging company in the first place.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Hollywood can make its movies wherever it wants, and then sell worldwide.
Apple cannot (does not want to, will not) abandon the EU market.
I spoke once to a engineer that built motors for ships. His problem was that the motors were just too big to be transported from where he was (Bavaria) to where the ships were being built (Hamburg). They just didn't fit in the roads between these two places. So he had to build only the "small" motors (four meters high, ten meters long), while the really big stuff was built in China and shipped by ship (or just used for ships built also in China).
This Zeppelin would be the perfect solution for him. The carrying capacity is still too low (10 tons), as the big motors weight on the order of 100 tons, but I don't see any difficulty in scaling this up.
And this is exactly why it will be strongly fought against.
To give a concrete example, in the last presidential elections in Austria the neonazi party FPÖ won in the polling booths, but lost in the postal votes. Their answer to that? Forbid postal voting, of course! Who uses it the most are university students that are away from their hometown, and have very little sympathy for the FPÖ.
I can see that people would be touchy about GMO organisms reproducing in the wild; just look at the comments here, people are already up in arms against a sterile GMO.
But why is it a harder genetic engineering problem? The technique used here was including a gene that would express a protein that stops the expression of other genes, stopping the descendants from developing. Why can't we simply include this gene in the X chromosome, so that only female descendants don't develop? Or include a gene that stops the expression of genes that exist only in the X chromosome?
What? Somebody being polite and admitting to a mistake? On my Slashdot?
I apologize for insulting you back.
Also, there is literally no way that the spread of Zika will stop, so efforts like these are silly.
Care to explain why? If we reduce the population of mosquitoes enough Zika will not spread. It is as simple as that.
And come on, there exist no animal whose diet consists exclusively of Aedes Aegypti. If we eliminate it, they will just eat other mosquitoes instead. It is not as if there is any lack of mosquitoes in the wild.
Nice. So you live somewhere without mosquitoes, and are telling from your golden throne that the people suffering from Zika, dengue, and yellow fever should do nothing and accept their suffering in order to not subject your royal highness to any imaginable risk?
Luckily the government of Brazil doesn't give a shit about what you think and it is spreading GMO mosquitoes all over the country.
This is something that a field trial can easily tell us. But I would bet that whathever tetracycline there is in our waterways it is not nearly enough to allow the mosquitos to survive.
Asexual reproduction would be one way to avoid being killed. There might be other recessive traits that also might surface.
It is obvious that asexual reproduction would be a way to avoid being killed. What I asked is how that could possibly evolve in Aedes aegypti. Are you suggesting that there already exist some female mosquitos that reproduce parthenogenetically, and that they will take over the species once the sexually reproducing ones die off? This is just impossible. Asexual reproduction is a complex adaptation, it doesn't just happen.
I think there is a widespread misconception that DNA is some kind of magic box that can do anything, and that we have no idea how it works. It is not magic. It cannot do everything. And we do know a lot about it.
And you are failing to take into account that the screwworm has been eradicated from some regions via a sterile male technique without any frankenstein appearing.
Are you stupid or did you just choose to ignore my entire post? It was not that long.
I asked how the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication could possibly lead to asexual reproduction. You answered how could resistance to eradication evolve in the first place.
What's wrong about that? Even if that happens we will have transformed Aedes Aegypti into a species that can only reproduce near chicken factories. That is a much better situation than what we have know, as it currently reproduces very well in densely populated urban centres.
If we are unlucky, the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication also gives this new mosquito some even more obnoxious trait like the ability to asexually reproduce, swarm, and kill its host.
Care to explain how this could possibly happen? The GMO mosquitos express a protein whose effect is to stop other genes from expressing. How could this lead to the ability of asexually reproducing?
Well, Aedes aegypti is an invase species, so its extinction would probably just lead to the recovery of the native mosquito populations. But which "insect with worse properties" do you have in mind? Aedes aegypti is as bad as it gets.