oh they were. it's actually quite clear: if you exempt some corp from taxes you are paying them the exempted sum compared to another business not receiving the exemption.
In my opinion it is highly unethical to construct such financial mechanisms with the only aim to reduce tax payments.
It's not about lower taxes in general, it is about lower taxes for a single specific company. And that constitutes state aid which is (mostly) forbidden under EU rules, as it is massively uncompetetive.
You make it sound legally straight forward, but I can't see how this constitutes state-aid; the double-Irish and dutch-sandwich were/are completely legal tax-avoidance schemes, for instance.
Apple isn't headquartered in Ireland, Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe are. The EU says these subsidiaries have been making untaxed profits, but it's not obvious that they've made any profits, ever (that's the whole point of the tax scheme in the first place.)
The grey area seems to be that there has been a cash hoard in Ireland which legally is on the Apple Inc. balance sheet, but hasn't been taxed. Again, however, Apple Inc. is not domiciled in Ireland so it's not the Irish governments job to collect that tax.
> the double-Irish and dutch-sandwich were/are completely legal tax-avoidance schemes, for instance
Are they completely legal or is this just a case of they are legal, until a court finds that they actually aren't legal.
Even if they are legal, I would argue that convoluted schemes to avoid paying taxes is unethical in the same way that moving manufacturing to a place with lax environmental or labor laws in unethical. Apple might be able to make phones with what is effectively slave labor legally, but they shouldn't.
> Are they completely legal or is this just a case of they are legal, until a court finds that they actually aren't legal.
To the extent that things are generally legal until they aren't.
The complaints from the US treasury are that the decision goes against pre-existing case law, and so shouldn't be applied retroactively. [1]
A 'power grab' is an adequate description of what's going on; the EU commission is basically forcing member states to redefine their own arm's length principle and their application of it. They would call it 'tax harmonization.'
Not taxing someone is not the same as paying them! By that logic I am paid by the government every time I listen to Simply Red without them taxing me for the privilege? Why am I not rich then?
Damn me, the linguistic backflips in this thread are amazing. Tax is the taking of something. Low taxes mean you take less, not that you are generously paying people!
> Not taxing someone is not the same as paying them!
That is a terrible straw-man - no one ever claimed that in this thread. Additionally - your argument relies on word play: in practise, Walmart giving you a $10 bill after you buy a $100 item has the same effect as giving you a $10 discount on the item.
When one corp (Apple) pays less taxes than others in the same jurisdiction (Ireland in this case), it is unfair - logically and according to European law. If Irish taxes were uniformly low to all companies (including the German, French & Greek ones), the EU would have no case.
It's not a straw man: the EU itself is claiming it - that's what the entire thread is about. If the EU isn't claiming that low taxes are "state aid" then why are they using state aid rules to try and enforce a tax rise?
in practise, Walmart giving you a $10 bill after you buy a $100 item has the same effect as giving you a $10 discount on the item
I guess you meant a $90 discount? But regardless, the wordplay is on your side: if Walmart charge you $10 for an item then by definition that item costs $10. If they charge other people more, perhaps because they don't have a loyalty card, that doesn't mean they're giving you "aid" under any normal definition of the term as they're still charging you money. Aid would be if they gave away their products for free, or explicitly made a donation to some cause. Merely having differential pricing isn't "aid" for the same reason that an airline charging me less to fly economy isn't "aid", nor is it a discount.
When writing laws, it's best if they can't be circumvented by obvious semantic games. That's why our judges are humans, and not computers—if someone is trying to jump through a semantic loophole, having judges decide the case can prevent that.
In this case in particular, describing the financial benefit as "lower taxes" instead of "giving money", when "giving money" is illegal, probably isn't a loophole that should be allowed, when the result is the same.
In my opinion it is highly unethical to construct such financial mechanisms with the only aim to reduce tax payments.