Kenny plays down chance of further Apple tax revelations

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said he does not expect any further damaging revelations about Ireland’s tax arrangements with Apple when the European Commission publishes the full version of its €13 billion tax ruling in the coming weeks.

Speaking after meeting Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook in Cupertino, California, Mr Kenny said he had no knowledge of what was likely to be contained in the final report on the ruling against Ireland, which is due within the next two to three weeks.

The commission ruled in August that the computer giant must pay up to €13 billion in unpaid taxes to Ireland, but the full text of the decision was not disclosed at the time due to commercial sensitivities.

Government officials in Dublin are liaising with commission staff about the publication of the full decision.

“I don’t have any reason to believe that there would be anything else in there that wasn’t referred to or contained in the judgment of the commission,” Mr Kenny told reporters when he later visited Facebook in Menlo Park.

The Taoiseach said Mr Cook told him Apple is to lodge its own appeal, in addition to the appeal submitted by the Government against the commission’s ruling that the California-based company benefited from illegal state aid in its Irish tax arrangements dating back a quarter of a century.

He expected the appeal to take “a couple of years” to wind its way through the European courts.

Mr Kenny said Mr Cook told him Apple was working on putting some money into an escrow holding account pending the outcome of the appeal against the ruling.

The Taoiseach stressed the Government’s opposition to the commission’s ruling.

“We believe that to be wrong. We believe it to be technically wrong. We believe that we can only collect tax in respect of economic activity generated in the country. Apple is not a brass plate,” he said.

“Obviously with almost 6,000 employees in Cork, at a very high level, [that] speaks for itself.”

He said Apple did not seek to renegotiate any terms of its tax arrangements in Ireland during their meeting.

He reassured Mr Cook the Irish corporation tax rate would remain at 12.5 per cent, regardless of plans by the incoming Trump administration to reduce the US corporate tax rate from 35 per cent to 15 per cent.

“Obviously the new administration to take up government here on the 20th of January will decide its own view about its level of corporate tax and that is a matter for the American administration,” he said.

Speaking in Paris on Thursday, European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager defended the EU’s right to use state-aid rules to investigate member states’ tax matters.

Addressing the OECD in Paris, she said that, in tax policy as in other areas, the commission can “help to support regulation by doing our job of enforcing competition rules”.