Most freepers will just look at the headline and go
Apple good
European Union bad
But why did Ireland grant Apple these tax waivers or abatements and only to them?
Is it because the Apple plant is in Ireland?
But any other smartphone assembly in an EU member state did not get such a waiver
Is that the gist of it
I don’t care for the EU but I can see the argument at least at a glance if you are going to have an EU
Apple iPhones are made in China long with pretty much all of their other products. The iMac manufacturing plant they have in Ireland is the only manufacturing facility that they still own in the entire world. It is completely out of their normal operating mode. They were had planned to shut it down years ago, but instead they expanded it... a little in the huge tax avoidance arrangement they made with the Irish government. So to save a few hundred assembly plant jobs and a few thousand phone support jobs Ireland gave Apple $14.3 billion in tax cuts which allowed the world's most profitable company to pay something like .005% on their European earnings.
The absurdity of the situation makes one wonder if the Clinton Foundation didn't have their fingers in the pie at some level. The only thing amazing to me here is that Apple's legal staff wasn't able to figure out a way to buy off enough of the corrupt political class to keep this scam going. It is a sure sign that they are slipping.
They didn't. There were many other companies who took advantage of Ireland's lower tax rate for companies wiling to locate there. When Apple did it in 1991, Apple was NOT a huge company as the EU is trying to characterize this deal. Apple grew into a large company not because of the tax deal but for other reasons.