plus interest...
To be appealed.
Ouch. Apparently they've been getting charged as little as 0.005% taxes by Ireland.
Course, Apple has much, much more than that in the bank (mostly in overseas banks to avoid US taxes), so it's not going to break them.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/30/eu_commission_rules_on_apple_ireland_tax_sweetheart_deal/Updated: The European Commission has ruled that tax arrangements between Ireland and Apple were in breach of the EU's state aid laws, and said the American corporation needs to cough up €13bn in back taxes, plus interest.
Delivering her judgment in Brussels this morning, the EU's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said:
Member States cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules. The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014.
The European Commission (EC) launched its investigation into the tax arrangements between Apple and Ireland in 2014. Until now, Apple has managed to route almost 90 per cent of its profits outside of the US through its Irish subsidiaries, as they hold the rights to all of the company's intellectual property.
Vestager stressed that the €13bn, which Ireland must arrange to recover, was not a penalty but rather the sum of Apple’s unpaid taxes. The amount could be lessened if Apple’s Irish subsidiaries moved more money to their parent company in the US – where it would become subject to US corporation tax.
Apple's two incorporated companies in Ireland, Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe, were found to be fantasy organisations concocted between the Irish taxman and Cupertino which "did not correspond to economic reality: almost all sales profits recorded by the two companies were internally attributed to a 'head office'" which the commission found only existed on paper.
