Surely an EU company, if big enough, could have moved to Ireland and negotiated a similar deal.
I understand that the issue here is the nature of the deal with a specific company, but the EU does not want member states to have too much leeway to cut taxes in any case. They have set minima for corporation tax and VAT, for instance.
Ultimately this is a question of competitive advantage and of ways for small, peripheric countries to survive and prosper. If everything was the same everywhere in the EU, then why would companies pick Ireland?
The US have "domestic tax-heavens" and the country is not falling apart... The EU isn't at risk, either, including because of the huge VAT levels compared to corporation tax.
Effectively, I think this boils down to powerful EU states who want to have high taxes and don't want others to undercut them.
It's odd that the view here, at least among Europeans, seems to be that the higher the taxes the better when the issue is obviously much more complex.
The major problem is that Ireland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg also have veto powers when it comes to EU wide regulations. Luckily they understood this was alienating the other EU members and so they conceded to a minimum of 15% taxation rate [1]
Yes, they are small and weak and had to concede to the big and powerful... And "alienating" is exactly my point: Those big and powerful don't want others to set lower tax rates than they have.
Fair, but then you should allow other countries tax stuff however they want. It's not fair saying "Ireland can lower taxes as much as they want for big tech, but countries that are food producers can't tax exports to Ireland a bit more to make up for the loss of income due to Ireland's taxation rate".
And if you allow that, what is the point of the European Union?
Hmm, "move to Ireland" means "home country" becomes Ireland. Obviously. Companies can do that, and in fact they do that. Fiat merged with Peugeot and suddenly the company is headquartered in the Netherlands, not France or Italy, for similar reasons.
In that case the EU would deem the state aid that the company receives is illegal. This is actually what this ruling claims, that Apple received illegal state aid.
Ah well, the EU does have tax havens and it will keep them after this ruling. But there are limits because after all the EU can't be a fair open market if one state gives out so huge state subsidies.
> Surely an EU company, if big enough, could have moved to Ireland and negotiated a similar deal.
yeah but "negotiate" is not how this is supposed to be, because it creates a non-level playing field. If I planned to move my single-person enterprise to Ireland I should be able to get the same deal as Apple did without having friends in the government.
One can argue that countries should be able to do this, but EU countries have agreed not to do it.
I understand that the issue here is the nature of the deal with a specific company, but the EU does not want member states to have too much leeway to cut taxes in any case. They have set minima for corporation tax and VAT, for instance.
Ultimately this is a question of competitive advantage and of ways for small, peripheric countries to survive and prosper. If everything was the same everywhere in the EU, then why would companies pick Ireland?
The US have "domestic tax-heavens" and the country is not falling apart... The EU isn't at risk, either, including because of the huge VAT levels compared to corporation tax.
Effectively, I think this boils down to powerful EU states who want to have high taxes and don't want others to undercut them.
It's odd that the view here, at least among Europeans, seems to be that the higher the taxes the better when the issue is obviously much more complex.