Ireland is not the only loophole: Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands made "special" deals with large corporations, too. https://www.ft.com/content/7ce5bf96-a83d-11e7-ab55-27219df83...

Can confirm; working in the Netherlands right now for a large organization which basically got granted 10M tax deduction for innovation which boils down to implementing React in our frontends, doing microservices in Kubernetes, and building CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins....

As a small company you can apply for this same innovation thing and get 17K tax deduction, and you have to put 500 hours into it. It's rediculous.

It's called "WBSO (Wet Bevordering Speur- en Ontwikkelingswerk)". Hoi Jan.

Yeah, I'm sure others too. Interested to see if these are pursued in court as well, or even other corporations with deals in Ireland (Apple are in no way the only one).

When the Apple ruling first came out there was talk of it being the first of others, but with how much resistance the Irish government have put up, it's hard to see them coming to fruition at this stage.

While that is true for Apple, if you'd read the article you'd notice that the effective corporate tax rate in Ireland (11.9%), as found by the study, is still higher than France's (8.2%), and far closer to the advertised rate of 12.5%.

Irish effective corporate tax is 11.8%.

The deal with Apple was considered a sweetheart deal and is illegal (under EU law but not Irish) and not available to other companies.

OP is right correct approach is a consolidated tax rate/base across EMU.