Downing Street said it would “welcome” Apple to the UK after the European Commission took the extraordinary step of hitting the company with an £11billion fine.
Although given the contortions they made to get there perhaps it is.
Downing Street said it would “welcome” Apple to the UK after the European Commission took the extraordinary step of hitting the company with an £11billion fine.
Although given the contortions they made to get there perhaps it is.
I don’t understand quite what’s going in re EU and Apple and Ireland and all that but I do understand Ireland has a very attractive 12.5% corporate tax rate which explains why Apple is there in the first place.
Part of Trump’s tax policy (which I think is ace) is for a US 15% corporate tax rate. That’s likely to result in quite a few US companies who’ve gone outside the US to get attractive rates a la Ireland rates, to come back into the US. And Trump will only hit them lightly when they come back in – it’s all designed to get business back into the US.
Given this EU fine to Apple why wouldn’t plenty of US companies start seriously thinking about POTUS Trump so they can go home and get away from the grasping euros.
The offer is a useful bargaining chip for the Brexit negotiations
I do find the US treasury bleating about the “fine” being “unfair” to be laughable, though. They’ve got more neck than a giraffe…
It wouldn’t work if it was a UK company, because they’re automatically tax resident here and so everything would have been taxable.
What might work would be a Jersey-registered company with the active bits in the UK.
But even then I can’t imagine HMRC would accept the sort of transfer pricing arrangement that the Irish did.
And even if we did attract them here with a deal, 18 months down the line Apple would be being berated by the muppets on the Public Accounts Committee
I think Julian’s right and this is a threat to the EU: shut us out completely and we’ll drop tax rates right down to attract business. Probably not an offer May totally wants to honour.
Why not just set the corporate tax rate to 0%?
The workers will still pay taxes because they have jobs. British investors will still pay some tax on the profits redistributed to them. The only reason I can think of to even have a corporate tax is to cover the necessary(and just the necessary) infrastructure costs.
Scratch the corporate tax for infrastructure. That can be taken care of through property taxes. At least with the tax structure we have locally.