Real Money: Apple Hit With 13 Billion Euro Fine For Tax Evasion

Yes, even for Apple - and even given the prospect of years of litigation - 13 billion Euros fits the definition of real money.

The issue is whether investors believe the company will beat the rap, get the fine substantially reduced - or sense that the Europeans smell blood and won't give up. JL

Sean Farrell and Henry MacDonald report in The Guardian:

The commission has been examining Apple’s tax deals with Ireland for three years. The deals have allowed the US company to pay very little tax on income earned throughout Europe. The commission opened a formal inquiry in 2014 after initial findings concluded that the arrangements amounted to state aid incompatible with the single market.
Apple has been ordered to pay a record figure of up to €13bn (£11bn) in back taxes to Ireland after the European commission ruled that deals between Apple and the Irish tax authorities amounted to illegal state aid.

The commission said Ireland’s tax arrangements with Apple between 1991 and 2015 had allowed the US company to attribute sales to a “head office” that existed on paper only and could not have generated such profits.

The result was that Apple avoided tax on almost all profits from sales of its products across the EU’s single market by booking the profits in Ireland rather than the country in which the product was sold.
Apple and Ireland have rejected the commission’s account and said they intend to appeal against the ruling. The figure of €13bn plus interest – 40 times the previous record for such a case – is the equivalent of the annual budget for the Irish health service. Irish campaigners are also calling for the windfall to be invested in public housing.
The taxable profits of Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe did not correspond to economic reality, the commission said. Apple paid an effective tax rate of 1% in 2003 on profits of Apple Sales International. The rate dropped to 0.005% in 2014.
Margrethe Vestager, the European competition commissioner, said: “Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules. The commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years.”Vestager said state aid rules did not cover where profits should have been recorded but suggested other countries could claim unpaid tax from Apple for the same period and that this would reduce the bill owed to Ireland.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said the commission was rewriting Apple’s record in Ireland, overriding Irish law and disrupting the international tax system. He said Apple chose the Irish city of Cork as its European base 30 years ago and had expanded from 60 workers to almost 6,000 in Ireland.
The commission’s decision threatened investment and job creation in Europe by subjecting companies to unpredictable tax rulings, Cook said. He said Apple would appeal and that he was confident of winning.

Cook said: “We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals. We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to a government that says we don’t owe them any more than we’ve already paid.”
The commission’s decision is a rebuff to US efforts to persuade it to drop the case after warnings of retaliation from Washington. The US Treasury department said last week the commission’s investigations departed from international tax norms and would affect US companies disproportionately.
Apple, which changed its tax arrangements with Ireland in 2015, should be able to pay the tax because it has a stockpile of more than $230bn (£176bn) of cash and securities, mostly held outside the US.
The €13bn figure covers the 10 years before the commission first requested information in 2013. The commission said it was up to Ireland to collect the tax from Apple but the Irish government wants the ruling reversed because it wants to preserve its status as a low-tax base for overseas companies.

Ireland’s finance minister, Michael Noonan, said Dublin would also appeal against the ruling. He said: “The decision leaves me with no choice but to seek cabinet approval to appeal. This is necessary to defend the integrity of our tax system, to provide tax certainty to business and to challenge the encroachment of EU state aid rules into the sovereign member state competence of taxation.”

A cabinet meeting will be held in Dublin on Wednesday to discuss the fallout from the ruling. At the heart of the Fine Gael-led administration’s objections is that it would cause Ireland “reputational damage” in the eyes of other mainly US multinationals thinking of establishing their European base in the Republic.

Fine Gael, the main opposition party Fianna Fáil, and a host of independent deputies serving as ministers in the coalition government support the low-tax regime for multinationals because it has created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Richard Murphy, a tax campaigner and a professor in international political economy at City University in London, said: “This is a great day for the sovereignty of the EU’s nations when it comes to tax. They will now be able to choose their own tax policies knowing another state should not be consciously undermining them when doing so. The Irish state has for too long been committed to tax abuse, unfair competition and secrecy, all of which are designed to undermine fair competition and increase inequality.”
The commission has been examining Apple’s tax deals with Ireland for three years. The deals have allowed the US company to pay very little tax on income earned throughout Europe. The commission opened a formal inquiry in 2014 after initial findings concluded that the arrangements amounted to state aid incompatible with the single market.