“The clamour surrounding Apple’s tax affairs in Washington on Monday is set to reverberate around the world in the coming days, following revelations that taxpayers abroad have suffered more than those in the US from the company’s tax avoidance tactics,” Richard Waters and James Politi report for The Financial Times.
“In one unusual arrangement, Apple cut a deal to pay a corporation tax rate of 2 percent or less in Ireland over the past decade, far below the usual 12 percent rate,” Waters and Politi report. “It then passed billions of dollars of earnings through subsidiaries in the country, enabling it to escape large tax payments to other countries around the world. All of Apple’s sales outside the Americas are channelled through the country, according to Monday’s revelations, which were contained in a report from the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations.”
“‘There’s going to be some shockwaves I believe going through Europe when the other countries see Ireland not even implementing their own tax rates but working out these deals with Apple,’ said Carl Levin, the committee’s chairman,” Waters and Politi report. “Tim Cook, Apple chief executive, is set to face withering questions over the revelations on Tuesday. But in a written submission published on Monday, Apple denied that the Irish entities were purely ‘shell companies’ designed to avoid taxes. Instead, it said that AOI had been set up to manage its “global flow of funds” and that investment income on the unit’s cash holdings were taxable in the US.”
Read more in the full article here.
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