Re:Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned
by groby_b on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @06:39PM
(#23853205)
Remember when you were a kid, and your parents told you to clean your room last week, and they gave you a whole week to catch up? And then oddly, you were still on the hook even though they waited a whole week before grounding you?
Same principle. Statutes of limitation exist for a reason.
As I see it, apple didnt fail to clean its room. It was told not to clean it by the parent, who then got yelled at by the grandparent, and now a week later apple's being grounded by the parent.
Ireland is the one that broke the treaty, not Apple. Apple played correctly within the rules & scope available to it, and is being retroactively told that those rules, in fact, did not exist, though certainly every other rule does exist, except for those that might not, depending on our decisions in twenty years.
Yet the EU sat on this for 12+ years allowing this agreement to continue. If they felt this was a concern, they should have addressed it in 2004... or any year between.