tenly

gwydion said:

latifbp said:

And a total of $190bn invested into the Irish economy by US companies in total out of the 700 doing business their. That is in addition to whatever taxes paid, employment, taxes collected from income from those employees. Oh, but let's just conveniently ignore what sort of investment into the local economy setting up business in a country requires I guess.

So, because a company invest in a country that country has to lower the taxes for them? 

The one here enaging in a meaningless parsing of word is you because you clearly don't want to understand what the case is about.

So you don't have anything to back your claim that Samsung pay less taxes than Apple in the EU. And not taking into account that what Cook talking about US taxes laws doesn't have to do anything with the EU case

In conclusion, you don't know what you talk about but you still post meaningless things here

gwydion said:

tenly said:

State aid would be like a gift of some sort.  A unilateral handout either in cash or perhaps as a discount in taxes owed - however the key word is unilateral.  If the agreement - secret or not - contains obligations from Apple in order to qualify for the discount in taxes, it becomes a contract.  So, in essence, Ireland has contracted with Apple to bring jobs and offices to the country...and Apple has done so.  There were obligations and deliverables on both sides, so it's clearly not "state aid".  It's a business agreement which Ireland decided to fund out of future tax revenue.  

It doesn't matter if the value of Apples presence exactly equals the discount in tax that Apple received.  Somebody in the Irish government clearly thought that it was a good agreement to enter into.  There may be an EU law that makes it illegal for Ireland to provide state aid to companies - but I seriously doubt there is a law that prohibits them from entering into mutually beneficial contracts with companies.  If it is determined that Apple received more benefit from the contract than Ireland did, that just means Ireland miscalculated.  It may have been a bad contract to enter into - but the EU can't just take every contract that Ireland "lost" on and declare the loss as state aid and then go after the other party to the contract for reimbursement - but that is exactly what's happening!  Hell - if that's the way things work - the Ireland government should just buy up all the shares in any stock IPO's - and if the stocks drop in value - declare the loss to be "state aid" and go after the company for reimbursement!  That's a ridiculous example - but it's also ridiculous what the EU is doing here.  They are the same as the patent trolls and class action lawyers.  They see how much money Apple has in the bank and they'll try anything to get a piece of it.

So...like I said above.  Ireland and Apple entered into a mutually beneficial contract.  Ireland asked Apple to set up shop in Ireland and create x number of jobs, lease x thousand square feet of office/factory space, etc, etc.  Apple - knowing that doing so has value, demanded compensation.  Ireland decided the best way to fund it was out of future tax revenue.  Maybe that's a legal funding move and maybe it's not - but it's clearly an issue between the EU and Ireland.  The only thing Apple is guilty of is negotiating a good contract!

You clearly don't know about EU laws but you don't stop to post things like this that are totally wrong.

And no, a state aid is not only unilateral, and no, it is not a contract, and no EU is not taking anything were there is a loss.

gadgetcanadav2 said:

According to the court case, Apple is getting up to 34% of the revenue sharing from Google, nowhere does it say Apple got a one time payment of $1 billion. What I think is hypocritical here is Tim Cook bashing other companies that track people and abuse their privacy but Apple has no problem taking 34% ongoing revenue share from Google who makes their money doing just that. The simple fact is Apple has made a deal to take 34% of the advertising money Google makes from tracking iOS users. Would Steve Jobs do this for $1 billion or would he go tell Google to F...Off and then go make an Apple search engine the default? I think he would do the latter. BTW, I would switch to the Google search engine anyways because it is the best but Apple should not be bashing their bedmates while preaching holier than though privacy ideals.