Re: Basic accountancy problem
All this does is illustrate the imperfections of the EU. Taxation is not standardised across the EU, so companies can exploit the differences. So Google, and Apple, and Amazon can arrange things so that the only subsidiary that earns a profit is based in Ireland. They do this with crazy things, like licensing their own brand name to themselves for an absurd fee, or lending themselves large sums of cash and charging themselves interest on the debt which can then be used to claim a tax rebate...
It's legal, but it does take huge sums of money out of the French, German, British, Italian economies, and doesn't put it back into the Irish economy. Instead it just sits still, doing nothing. It doesn't even go back into the American economy. That's economically unhealthy.
One day this will be too big a problem to ignore. States must have tax revenue, and increasingly the burden is falling on their own citizenry and less on large global corporations. The pressure to tax revenue will become higher and higher.
Of course, the alternative would be to sort out the whole international tax system to close off the loopholes. But given that not even the EU can agree on harmonising tax codes I think revenue taxation will become inevitable.