France and Germany are looking to crack down on loopholes that allow U.S. tech companies, including Apple, to minimize their tax contributions at the expense of local rivals.
According to a new report, France will kick things off by proposing “simpler rules” for taxing tech giants. These will be revealed at a meeting with EU officials in mid-September.
The U.S. government may intervene as Apple appeals its massive 13 billion euro ($14.52 billion) tax bill from the European Union.
The demand for money was made last year, after the E.U. ruled that Apple has taken advantage of illegal state aid in routing its profits through Ireland. It seems that the U.S. government doesn’t see entirely eye-to-eye with Europe, though.
Google has been fined 2.4 billion euros ($2.7 billion) by European Union regulators for reportedly skewing its search results in a way that hurts smaller shopping search services.
In addition to the massive fine, Google has been told that if it doesn’t stop its “illegal” suppression of rival price comparison services within 90 days, the European Commission will fine it up to 5 percent of its daily revenue.
Attempts to force tech companies in the U.K. to hand over encrypted messages could be scuttled by EU proposals.
European members of parliament for the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee have tabled laws banning countries from seeking to break encrypted messages. It would also force tech companies which don’t use strong encryption for communications to do so.
So far, most of Apple’s wrangles concerning its European tax issues has been carried out by the company’s accountants and legal team.
That could change in 2017, however, when none other than Tim Cook has been requested to attend a meeting in Dublin, Ireland, alongside the EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager.
Ireland is set to submit its formal appeal of a European Commission ruling that claimed Apple owes the country more than $14 billion in unpaid taxes.
The controversial tax ruling has been opposed by Irish citizens, a majority of whom say they don’t want Apple’s money. Ireland’s Finance Minister Michael Noonan said today that the country’s government has no choice but to appeal.
With his open letter defending Apple’s Irish tax strategy, Tim Cook positions his company as a sledgehammer-tossing freedom fighter at battle with Big Brother-style EU bureaucracy.
But unlike Cook’s previous missives on LGBT rights and the importance of privacy, this open letter seems unlikely to be met with near-unanimous support. While railing against the EU’s massive assessment of €13 billion euros in back taxes owed by Apple, Cook ignores the facts of the matter — and seems tone-deaf about painting the world’s biggest company as an underdog.
The European Commission has finally finished its investigation into Apple’s tax breaks with Ireland and it appears that the company will be slapped with a fine for more than $1 billion in back taxes.
The commission’s final ruling is expected to come tomorrow, according to a new report that claims Ireland will be expected to calculate exactly how much Apple owes.
Apple has announced plans to hire an extra 1,000 employees in Ireland — as the deadline draws closer concerning the European Union announcing their decision about whether or not Apple dodged taxes thanks to the Irish government.
Apple will add 1,000 staff to its offices in Cork by mid-2017, where it currently operates the only Apple-owned manufacturing facility in the world, building Mac computers.
In a landmark decision Tuesday, the European Court of Justice ruled that European Union regulators can override the Safe Harbor agreement, a 15-year-old accord that has — until now — allowed Apple, Google, Facebook, and about 4,500 other U.S. companies to transfer data from European users to the U.S.
The court believes that the current agreement violates European citizens’ right to privacy by exposing their private data to the U.S. government through the American companies’ cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies.
After years of examining the Android operating system, the European Commission has launched a formal antitrust investigation into claims that Google unfairly forces competitors into bundling its own apps on their devices.
Apple has today increased the annual subscription cost of its Mac and iOS Developer Programs in several countries across Europe. While the prices remain the same at $99 in the U.S., Europeans can now expect to pay anything from $96 to $121, depending on where they live.
Apple has introduced a new 14-day return window for digital purchases made in several European countries. App Store, iTunes, and iBookstore items purchased in the U.K., Germany, Italy, and France are now eligible for complete refunds, and users are not required to give a reason for returning their order.
Regulators are set to break down the reason tax deals given to Apple in Ireland violate EU laws, according to people familiar with the matter.
The European Commission began formal investigations into the tax avoidance issue back in June, and plans to publish its findings as early as today — with the claim that tax deals between Apple and the Irish government could fall under the heading of illegal state aid.
While Apple has yet to make a comment on the matter, the Irish government has spoken up; describing its position as “confident” that the Apple deal represents “no breach of state-aid rules.” It claims that it has already submitted a formal response to the European Commission, in which it addresses in detail “the concerns and some misunderstandings.”
Remember back in the early 2000s when Apple opening a brick-and-mortar store in prime real estate locations seemed as crazy a gamble as Apple deciding to create its own mobile phone? Very few people would admit so now — particularly Apple’s rivals like Samsung and Microsoft which have followed the Apple Store example with their own surprisingly similar retail outfits.
In an attempt to stop others from copying the slick, high fashion minimalism of its Apple Stores, Apple has secured a court ruling allowing it to register the layout of its retail stores in the European Union as a trade mark — extending the intellectual property status that it already carries in the U.S.
Apple paid just 3.7% tax on its non-U.S. income last year — and the European Commission isn’t happy about it.
Registering its overseas business in Ireland, Apple is one of three companies being investigated for abusive transfer pricing and other forms of corporate profit shifting, with the other two being Starbucks and Fiat Finance and Trade.
The subject of corporate tax avoidance has become an increasingly hot-button issue in recent years, as the result of probes into international businesses like Apple and Google, which use convoluted structures as a means of slashing their tax bills.
An investigative magistrate in Belgium reportedly considered forcing Internet service providers to block Apple’s website, after claims that the company is misleading customers over warranty options.
Apple has been involved with a long-running dispute with the European legal system over its one-year limited warranty, which it offers as standard to consumers around the world — but which is in conflict with European regulations that allows buyers a minimum of two years’ free protection.
Europeans will next year be able to take their smartphones anywhere within the EU and enjoy calls, texts, and data without paying a penny more than they do at home. Expensive roaming fees are set to be scrapped by July 1, 2014, after the European Commission voted to fast-track a major overhaul of telecoms regulation.
Apple still isn’t correctly informing consumers about their warranty rights in Europe, according to the European Union’s Justice Commissioner, Vivian Reding.
The Cupertino company changed its European warranty policies last year after it came under fire for not meeting EU regulations. But it’s still not providing consumers with the right information in at least 21 of the EU member states, Reding says.
Apple’s AppleCare Protection Plan has come under fire once again in Europe after Test-Aankoop/Test-Achats, a Belgian consumer watchdog, filed a complaint against the way in which the Cupertino company markets the product in Europe.
Customers within the European Union are entitled to a free two-year warranty with any consumer electronics purchase, but Test-Aankoop/Test-Achats claims that Apple’s warranty marketing doesn’t properly explain these rights to Belgian shoppers.
The European Commission’s Vice President for Competition Policy, Joaquín Almunia, has confirmed that it will charge Samsung “very soon” in an antitrust patent case after the Korean electronics giant broke competition rules by filing patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple. Samsung has been under investigation since January for a possible breach of antitrust rules, and earlier this week, it dropped all of its injunction requests against Apple in Europe.
After an anti-trust lawsuit was launched by the European Union earlier this year to check whether or not Apple’s e-book pricing is anti-competitive, Apple and four publishers are ready to accept an offer from the EU to end the probe.
The acceptance of the offer hands Amazon a big victory in the battle for e-book pricing in Europe as it opens the door for Amazon to continue to sell online books cheaper than its rivals.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has called for Apple’s warranty adverts to be examined in the European Union’s 27 states. Reding hopes to establish whether or not the Cupertino company fails to mention a buyers’ right to a minimum two-year warranty for all electronics, including Macs and iOS devices.
Apple has lost an appeal against a court ruling in Germany to have its iCloud push services restored. The service was disabled back in February after it was ruled that Apple had infringed on patents owned by Motorola Mobility. While iCloud is still available, users now have to open up their Mail app and fetch new email manually, or set their device to fetch email at certain intervals.
Having been fined $1.2 million by Italian regulators late last year over its marketing for AppleCare products, Apple has been forced to clarify its warranty coverage for customers in the European Union, and compare its extended warranty products against statutory EU warranty coverage.