can you give us a summary? Is Apple paying this to the U.S.?
In a terse answer, yes, about 90% of it was already paid in IncomeTaxes to the United States government. The EU idiot commission was claiming that somehow it was anti-competitive for Apple to pay it’s income taxes at the US’s higher rate than it was to pay the lower rate in Ireland. The 10% that is not paid to the US is a business tax credit against US taxes on Apple’s US Income Taxes, though. IF the court had ruled in the EU Commission’s favor, Apple would have essentially had to refine several years of back US income tax form, recalculating what it owed to the US and the US would have had to refund almost all the income taxes Apple had paid to it for it’s European sales profits, then Apple would have transferred the money’s it has already set aside in an escrow holding account (about $18 billion) to Ireland, who did not want it.
In other words, it would have been a transfer of taxes already paid to the US over several years by Apple, to the EU. . . Lost in all of the words published on this topic is that for the most part, it would not be Apple that would be out the money, but the US government which had already received it from Apple over about five years of income tax receipts. That’s why the US Treasury had joined Apple and Ireland in arguing this case in the EU court. The EU’s competition commission really had no legal jurisdiction to make their absurd claim and issue such an order, but it’s taken almost FIVE YEARS to finally get it settled, but the Commie-sion can STILL appeal even this court’s decision and severe legal slap down!
Even more importantly, had the court ruled the Commission was right, it would have upended over 250 years of treaties governing international taxation for trade, generally understood international accounting practices and how multinational corporations are taxed. . . all based on an appointed, non-elected bureaucrat’s notion that she has authority to do whatever she thinks to foster competition, regardless of what her legal purview really is.