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Companies have had days in court and presidents have been set, even if the name of the defendant was not Apple. This isn't some crazy scheme that Apple's accountants cooked up. Even when the dutch sandwich was new, it was still built from components that individually had case law backing them up.

You don't just get to reinterpret the law because you don't like what effects it has. The courts are only really able to interpret ambiguities. Where the law is clear (and it is pretty clear here), you need to change the laws.



That's pretty much all courts do: interpret the law. There's a lot of ambiguity here, hence all the push-back on Apple stowing profits offshore. In my opinion, the only case that can be made is that, in general, profits made outside of the US by corporations is not subject to tax. That is hardly the only issue being discussed, in fact, it strikes me as the most simplistic interpretation.

There are lots of other good questions, and it may not turn out to be the case that everything Apple has done is legal. For instance...

Is it legal for Apple to attribute all of their intellectual property to their Irish subsidiary?

Is it legal for Apple to avoid paying taxes in Ireland by sending the money to a fictitious head office with no physical location?

And so on and so forth.

https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2016/08/30/apples-irish-tax-bi...




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