The European Commission slapped Apple with a €13 billion penalty for allegedly accepting a sweetheart tax deal from Ireland earlier this year. Cork residents resent Dublin’s unwavering defense of the tech giant, most recently its support of the company’s appeal Monday that claimed the EU Commission overstepped its powers. Instead of banking an amount roughly the size of the country’s annual health budget, Irish leaders recoiled at the order and defended its four-decade-long relationship with Apple. [...]
Apple has been a lifeline for many in a city where the suicide rate is twice the national average and the economy continues to be weak, though the recovery appears to be happening faster than the rest of the country in part because of the tech industry. Apple’s workforce in the city swelled from a few hundred employees in the early 1980s to more than 4,000 today. There’ll be more work in 2018 when a new facility opens in the center of a scrappy housing estate. It’s one of three Apple locations in the city but the only one with wild horses grazing nearby.
Though Apple employs more than 4,000 people in a city of 125,000, many locals are appalled that the company hasn’t contributed more to the local economy through taxes. Apple paid an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003. That slid to 0.005 percent in 2014, vastly lower than Ireland’s corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent, according to the European Commission. [...]
The government in Dublin is an awkward position. A €13 billion windfall would buffer some of the effects of Brexit but squash overseas investment from Apple and other multinationals. Without foreign cash, jobs will disappear.
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