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Last August, the EC filed a complaint against Apple. After an investigation, European officials came to the conclusion that the peculiarities of the tax regime in Ireland allowed Apple to avoid taxation on almost all profits received from the sale of products on the EU market. This happened because the company registered all sales in Ireland, and not in the countries where the products were actually sold.
The EC statement noted that this selective treatment of Apple allowed the corporation to reduce its effective corporate tax rate from 1 percent of its European profits in 2003 to 0.005 percent in 2014. The “savings” amounted to about 13 billion euros.
