Oh, how beautiful Panama is… or Ireland: Apple’s European headquarters in Cork
Photo: dpa
German tax law may seem very confusing and lame, but it is a battleground in which the state fights with corporations for its income. As the well-known Potsdam tax lawyer Andreas Musil, who died in 2022, once told me in frustration, it is dominated by lawyers, the majority of whom are close to the CDU and FDP and who, with their lectures, reports and essays, seek to weaken the state by increasing the taxation of large Want to keep companies and large assets as small as possible. Musil was SPD, for the state and therefore an outsider.
But there are also opposing movements, especially internationally: the “Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation” has been working for almost ten years (ICRICT), in which prominent critical economists and lawyers such as the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the lawyer Eva Joly, who sat for the French Greens in the EU Parliament, the Frenchman Thomas Piketty or the Indian Jayati Ghosh for greater taxation of international corporations such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, enter.
Even though the ICRICT people work at top universities, mostly in the USA, it is a long, grueling battle to bring the corporations out of their thicket of tax havens, shell companies and tax giveaways into the public consciousness, because for a long time it was like this that states around the world were competing to undercut each other in tax law in order to better please corporations. They hardly had to pay taxes anymore (legendary: Apple with its official headquarters in Ireland) and contrary to what was promised, there were neither more jobs nor an increase in general prosperity.
The documentary “Tax Wars” by Hege Dehli and Xavier Harel, which will be shown on Arte on Tuesday evening, tells of this fight against arbitrariness and ridicule. And also about the history of neoliberalism and the exploitation of the Global South. The evening before there was a preview in a cinema in Berlin-Mitte, organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Oxfam and the Tax Justice Network. Christoph Trautvetter and Parsa Marvi for the SPD parliamentary group were present for the network. Before the film started, Trautvetter formulated a small “riddle for the audience”: When evaluating the whole numbers that the film offers, one should pay attention to whether the taxation of global corporations is comparable to the taxation of a typical German bakery? Their owners are charged 45 percent including income tax, whereas Apple only had to pay 0.005 percent for its profits in Ireland.
But due to investigative journalism (Luxembourg Leaks, Panama and Pandora Papers), educational campaigns and, above all, the increased health costs during the pandemic, the state’s look-alike and laissez-faire policy could no longer be maintained and communicated. Biden and Macron began to move away from this and eventually the EU too. ICRICT wanted 25 percent taxation as the global minimum rate, but they got ten percent, signed by 140 states in 2021. The EU wants 15 percent. Is this a success story? According to Parsa Marvi, the corporations are now “working out a sweat.” However, so far only the so-called excess profits of the 100 largest companies have been taxed. Together they have had to pay around a billion dollars more so far. But $220 billion would be possible. These are the fronts in the “tax war”. Marvi called for an expansion of tax investigations. What did Ronald Reagan say when he ushered in the age of neoliberalism more than four decades ago? “The government doesn’t have a problem, the government is the problem.”
“Tax Wars – War of Taxes”, Tuesday, 8:15 p.m. on Arte and in the Arte media library
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