US: Apple CEO lashes out at EC after Apple ordered to pay $14.5B

Apple CEO Tim Cook cried foul on Tuesday after the European Commission ordered Apple to pay $14.5 billion in “unpaid” taxes and declared the company’s Irish tax scheme illegal.

Cook rejected the demand as having “no basis in fact or law.”

“The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process,” Cook wrote in a letter to customers. “The opinion issued on August 30th alleges that Ireland gave Apple a special deal on our taxes.”

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said the European Commission found the Irish government broke state aid rules when it signed deals allowing Apple to reduce its tax bill.

“Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies — this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” she said in a statement. “The Commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014.”

“We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals,” Cook responded. “We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to a government that says we don’t owe them any more than we’ve already paid.”

Full Content: Digital Trends

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