No, the EU checks if the tax systems are fair and held to certain standards.
In this case this special deal was only available to a select few companies.
Other countries have deals that cover IP revenue or certain taxation tresholds which effectively give little taxation to multinationals, so discrimination is not enough to be considered unfair.
They probably just screwed with the process and didn't get the deal in a generic enough format to be accepted by the EU.
This incompetence will cost dear to Ireland as the next big tech companies will go elsewhere to sell to Europe.
Were these companies selected on the basis on employment numbers or revenue?
AFAIK Apple doesn’t have so many employees in Ireland that would generate enough revenue for a 13B tax bill. So they must have been booking offshore revenue via an Irish subsidiary.
When I buy software licenses here in India I’ve noticed that the billing almost always is in Ireland.
Dublin alone has more than 70,000 people employed in technology and IT companies take 40% of office space, placing it in the top three of EMEA Tech Cluster Rankings by CBRE and the number one location for digital companies. Ireland overall hosts 16 of the top 20 global tech companies and the top 3 enterprise software providers 106,000+ people are employed in the ICT industry.
430+ financial services companies operate in Ireland with 47,000+ people employed in the industry.
Seven of the ten of the world's top pharmaceutical companies including Janssen, AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck/MSD, Novartis, and Thermo Fisher Scientific call Cork home. In total there are now over thirty companies operating in the sector that employ over 10,000 people in Cork alone. 90+ pharmaceutical companies operate in Ireland. 45,000 people employed in IDA client companies
We have €116+ billion annual in pharma exports and are the third largest exporter of pharmaceuticals globally.
Ireland is home to 14 of the top 15 MedTech companies – with over 40,000 people employed in the sector
The country is a tax vessel, nothing more, remove the megacorps offices with barely any local businesses as well as the plane registrations and they drop right back somewhere bellow the average gdp per capita of europe.
Ireland economy is 85% services, compare that to Germany's 68%
Germany has the Rhine and is the centre of the continent, and also has the Marshall Plan boost post 1950 for their infrastructural development. Ireland is an Island whose population only hit pre-famine levels in the last 3 years.
Of course our economy is going to skew heavier service based! How are you going to ship cars and heavy industrial goods from Ireland to the rest of the EU and compete with Germany or France on shipping, raw materials etc..?
If you can't be intellectually honest and accept that Ireland would be a fraction of what it is without its tax evasion system idk what to say, there is literally not a single source that will tell you otherwise, even their own official reports mention that it is the case.
When 25% of your GDP comes for a single foreign company with 6000 employees in your country it's time to raise an eyebrow, especially when the facility's job is to assemble "made to order" computers (like the dude at the corner of my street).
> The "multinational tax schemes" used by some of these multinational firms contribute to a distortion in Ireland's economic statistics; including GNI, GNP and GDP
> A particularly dramatic growth in Ireland's 2015 GDP (from 1% in 2013, to 8% in 2014, to 25% in 2015) was shown to be largely driven by Apple restructuring their double Irish subsidiary
We don't use GDP because we're not a bloody Coal and Steel Union in the 1950s, we're a Service based economy in a Globalised marketplace.
We use Modified GNI (GNI*) - GNI minus the depreciation on Intellectual Property, depreciation on leased aircraft and the net factor income of redomiciled PLCs - which accounts for almost all of what you're citing bar some more egregious BEPS tools which are closed for years.
Yeah this is the way it works. The "pre-sales" of working out what you need is don e in whatever country you are in. Then at the last moment, when everything is prepared and the invoicing is ready, they transfer you to an Irish sales person who takes your payment.
Yeah very strange... people get together, vote laws, and respect the laws they voted... how strange indeed
You can be for or against the EU but none of that is strange lmao. You can't play the game for the nice rules and say "no" when the rules you don't like affect you
Treaties bind nations to behave in certain ways all the time, it's basically what they are for.
EU membership is in effect a set of treaties that a member-nation signs up to, which create these supra-national bodies like the court and also a lot of trade and tax rules which get harmonised across the union. Ireland has signed these treaties, which give it access to the market and the benefits of being in the EU.
If it wishes to set its tax rules without reference to the EU, it will either need to get the EU rules changed through the political process, or leave the treaties and treaty organisations.
Yes, you can view this as ceding sovereignty, but in some ways every treaty does that.
So EU runs Ireland’s tax system? What happened to sovereignty? How does this work?