Author: TonyGosling
Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2016 11:13 pm (GMT 0)
The Eye. Page 20
Letter from Dublin.
Ours is a small island on the dark edge of Europe, occasionally blessed, more often benighted. Recently, we were blessed with the offer of a $13bn tax refund, by the European Commission to be paid us by that pillar of corporate rectitude, the US based Apple Corp. Our trusty Taoiseach (PM) Enda Kenny rose to the occasion by savaging the Commission hand that gave, refused the gift and went slavering before an incandescent Apple. The shaky coalition of all the discontents that Kenny leads tried to tell him to grab the gift horse and chain it the basement of the Central Bank, instanter. But no. Kenny will appeal against this windfall. Why ? Well, you can only dribble urinary matter on the US of A so many times. Which is why part of the answer lies in our key Courts, situated on the bank of James’ Joyce’ Anna Livia Plurabelle, alias the river Liffey, which can sometimes be darker than the waters that flow past them, especially when they contain the legal corpse of Apple Corp.
This is a corpse that, if it comes to legal life again, may cost Apple and its 8 fellow internet giants, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, You Tube, Hotmail, Skype, Pal Talk and AOL a tad more than $13 Bn. And may explain why the legal system here is bending like a willow in a storm. Long forgotten, but just now surfacing again in court, is an Irish High Court judgement against the 9, first made in 2014 and unreported outside the land of saints and scholars as we sometime call ourselves. In June of that year, Judge Gerard Hogan of the High Court found the 9, and the US government that backs them, guilty of “indiscriminate mass surveillance” in Europe. No one seemed to notice that ‘”mass indiscriminate surveillance’ is criminal in many European countries like the UK and unlawful in all. Even fewer noticed that the plaintiff against the massed divisions of America’s internet best, an Austrian student called Schrems, had bundled the entire published revelations of Edward Snowden into 14 lever arch files and sworn them. At that point Snowden ceased to be hearsay and became sworn evidence in a court of law. Silence descended while the judgement went to the European Court of Justice, where the US Government and its internet satraps confidently expected that the case would be killed; politics before rights every time. It wasn’t. Last year the European Court took a step beyond anything the Irish judge had said and halted all legal transfers of personal data from Europe to the US. It didn’t halt the transfers. They just all became illegal.
Our gallant Taoiseach rewarded Judge Hogan with a promotion to the Appeal Court, just after the 2014 judgement, getting him well out of the way of a clearly signalled attempt by the US to undo the judgements.
Which brings us to the here and now. The hero of the saga is an unlikely Austrian obsessive, Max Schrems. In the face of opposition from the Irish Data Regulator, and total inaction by the other 27 European Regulators and their annual E500 million budget, Schrems was the one who got the case to Judge Hogan. Schrems got everything he wanted. The US indicted in court for the mass surveillance and an order against the Irish Regulator to complete his original complaint against Facebook.
The Irish Regulator, Helen Dixon, is based over a fish and chip shop in the remote Irish town of Portarlington, adjacent to the largest bog in Ireland, that of Allen. She has spent 7 months not investigating Schrems complaint and is back in court, making him the defendant in a non issue about private data contracts. Hogan’s promotion now clarifies. It’s not the High Court she’s in. It’s the obscure Commercial Court, before a somewhat less educated judge than Professor Dr Hogan. And she’s faced Schrems with 11 potential and expensive hearings before that full, and largely irrelevant matter, comes to trial in Feb 2017.
that was tech
this is economic
http://www.blacklistednews.com/US_DoJ_hits_Deutsche_Bank_with_record_%2414bn_fine/54142/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Quote:
Apple ordered to pay €13bn after EU rules Ireland broke state aid laws
European commission says Apple got illegal help with tax breaks but CEO Tim Cook says ruling threatens investment in Europe
Why Apple is facing a €13bn tax bill in Ireland
Sean Farrell and Henry McDonald
Tuesday 30 August 2016 15.33 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/30/apple-pay-back-taxes-eu-ruling-ireland-state-aid
Apple has warned that future investment by multinationals in Europe could be hit after it was ordered to pay a record-breaking €13bn (£11bn) in back taxes to Ireland.
The world’s largest company was presented with the huge bill after the European commission ruled that a sweetheart tax deal between Apple and the Irish tax authorities amounted to illegal state aid.
The commission said the deal allowed Apple to pay a maximum tax rate of just 1%. In 2014, the tech firm paid tax at just 0.005%. The usual rate of corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5%.
“Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” said the European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, whose investigation of Apple’s complex tax dealings has taken three years.
Vestager’s ruling prompted an angry response from Apple and from Ireland and is likely to spark a political row between the US and the EU. The US Treasury said the ruling threatened to damage “the important spirit of economic partnership between the US and the EU”.
In a letter to customers, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, claimed the ruling could deal a blow to big companies investing in Europe: “Beyond the obvious targeting of Apple, the most profound and harmful effect of this ruling will be on investment and job creation in Europe. 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.”
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 only existed on paper and could not have generated such profits.
The result was that Apple avoided tax on almost all the profit generated from its multi-billion euro sales of iPhones and other products across the EU’s single market. It booked the profits in Ireland rather than the country in which the product was sold.
Corporation tax rates in Europe.
Apple and Ireland said they intend to appeal against the ruling.
The figure of €13bn plus interest is 40 times the previous record for such a case and the equivalent of the annual budget for Ireland’s health service. Irish campaigners called 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.
Vestager said: “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 suggested other countries, including the US, might now examine how Apple did business within their borders. These other jurisdictions might then claim a share of the unpaid tax from Apple for the same period. This would reduce the bill owed to Ireland.
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Tim Cook, Apple CEO. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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.
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.
Apple, which changed its tax arrangements with Ireland in 2015, should easily be able to pay the huge tax bill because it has a cash mountain of more than $230bn (£176bn) of cash and securities, mostly held outside the US. The tech group keeps the money outside the US because it would be forced to pay US tax charges if it repatriated the money.
Advertisement
The €13bn figure covers only the 10 years before the commission first requested information in 2013. The commission, which does not have the authority to go back any further, said it was up to Ireland to collect the tax from Apple.
The Irish government, however, 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 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.
A tunnel to Wales or a gallery full of Gauguins: how Ireland could spend Apple’s money
Read more
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.”
Prof Louise Gracia of Warwick University business school said: “This ruling is a serious attempt at curtailing the power large multinationals have in avoiding their tax liabilities, and sends a warning to countries that facilitate hard-edged corporate tax minimisation strategies.”
She added: “It also shines a spotlight on the paltry levels of corporate tax that large multinationals are actually paying. Even if we accept the job and wealth creation arguments put forward by multinationals as mitigation against tax liability, this has to be within reason.”
Toby Quantrill, Christian Aid’s principal adviser on economic justice, said: “The staggering amount of money at stake here suggests that millions of citizens are paying a painfully high price for multinationals’ cosy tax deals with certain governments.
“This is not a one-off situation – it is part of a damaging race to the bottom in which governments are competing on who can offer multinationals the lowest tax bill. It’s time to get multinationals’ tax affairs out in the open, so we can all see how much they are actually contributing to the rest of society.”
In the US Peter Kenny, senior market strategist at Global Markets Advisory Group, said it was not yet clear which side would ultimately prevail, but that the ruling was a watershed moment. “There’s no telling whether the verdict will stand on appeal, but we know that the landscape is changing for US corporations in the EU.”
He described Vestager’s ruling as “just the tip of the spear – an enormously important ruling” because US-based companies “have traditionally used the EU as a way of circumventing a higher US corporate tax code.”
Apple’s share price, however, was largely unmoved. In a note to investors, Gene Munster, analyst at Piper Jaffray, said the €13bn potential bill was not a big deal for the huge company. “While the penalty is large in absolute terms, it represents a small portion of AAPL’s [Apple’s] overall valuation.”
It is not yet clear which side will be backed by either of the 2016 presidential candidates. Republican Donald Trump has said he would force US companies, Apple in particular, to move manufacturing jobs within the nation’s own borders, rather than allowing them to seek cheaper labour overseas. He has also said he would lower the US corporate tax rate.
His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has also hinted that she might lower the corporate tax rate. She has closer ties to Apple than Trump. Cook held a fundraiser for Clinton on 24 August.
_________________
www.rethink911.org
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.l911t.com
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/