BTW, Amazon opened a London region for AWS last week. Not sure if server location plays a part in corp tax residency but it’s one less reason for companies to run infrastructure from Ireland.
UK tax law allows companies to deduct the cost of “share bonus schemes” in calculating their taxable profits. Many other countries, including Ireland, do not. (I know Ireland allows intercompany recharges but these then give rise to taxable profits elsewhere), so this is as much about tax policy as anything.
Also, the UK tax deduction is only available when the employee pays tax on the share bonus scheme so focussing on the company is only looking at a half the picture.
rte.ie/news/2016/0123/762384-google-tax/
Does 130m stg not seem like petty cash for a company as large as google who are happy to pay 1bn to get their search engine as default search engine on apple.
Yeah it was a throw away comment …I can’t stand fakebook…I wish them every corp pain imaginable. …a little dork writes some code to essentially handle pictures and text …ffs! …This is the ed sheeran and edel of the computing world…popular? … yes …interesting? …no.
Anyway…You sound knowledgeable the corp tax area
What’s your thoughts on the recent google news or the pending apple news, specifically impact to Ireland?
Some day building datacentres in Ireland might be seen as crazy as building golf courses in the desert.
The only input they need is power and the only native power Ireland has is Peat which will be exhausted soon, very limited hydro and intermittent wind.
The new source of Gas off the west coast can be better used elsewhere.
Norway with its immense hydro resources would be better placed to take this business if it weren’t for their socialsit taxing model.
Don’t fibre networks run at the speed of light; in which case Norway isn’t so far away.
If Ireland had a nuclear industry where you effectively get the electricity for free once costs are sunk then Ireland might make sense but would you build a nuclear plant to win this business? No thanks, do without.
Depends what they’re doing; the speed of light mounts up quite quickly for some applications, but more importantly the switching delays can be significant since you don’t necessarily have a single unbroken strand of glass from your datacenter to the Norwegian datacenter.
Also datacenter do have more than one input; the connectivity is a crucial component, and Dublin does quite well for that, amazingly.
This news story has implications for Ireland. More income will be taxed in UK rather than in Ireland. irishtimes.com/business/econ … -1.2508797
130m may be petty cash to Google but not to Ireland.
Still, if a Norwegian soverign wealth fund wanted to build a post-oil economy then this somewhere where they could afford to invest in IT infrastructure and then leverage their competitive advantage of excess hydro-electric capacity and cool climate.
Lots of Nordic countries are trying that (e.g. Iceland). The problem is that you need the exact right magic mix of cheap power, multi-route connectivity, cheap real estate, and tax breaks. Amazingly, Ireland seems to have stumbled on a good combination, probably completely by accident. There’s also a decent industry-funded lobby group (Host In Ireland) that markets Ireland abroad as a datacenter and hosting location.
A big drawback is having multiple fibre landings in order to give true diversity. Ireland has that by accident of geography, so we’re ahead of lots of other countries.