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Interesting.

So do you mean that as some part of the agreement, to be treated as a "genuine Irish company" (from a tax perspective) Apple was forced/strongly nudged open R&D, assembly or commerce centers in addition to the mailbox/lawyer shell offices?

While I'm sure the grunt of Apple's actual molecule movement business is in China (or elsewhere; not Ireland), these Cork job listings (for instance) seem real, no? https://jobs.apple.com/en-ie/search?location=ireland-IRL



I believe it bears pointing out here that Apple's first factory outside of the US was set up in Ireland in 1979. All of the Apple IIs sold in Europe were built in it. The manufacturing jobs eventually moved on to China, but other roles replaced them. The fact is that Apple has had a sizeable workforce in Ireland for nearly forty-five years.


They don’t need a genuine Irish company, the Alphabet >>shell corp<< doesn’t have any workers in Ireland. Edit: to be clear Alphabet itself does, but that’s not part of the tax doge.

Also, they have offices in every significant country in Western Europe. UK, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Norway, Sweden, and yes Ireland.

https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/locations/?region=north-ame...

Obviously they don’t have anyone in Vatican City.


Alphabet has a massive workforce of X000s in Ireland, spanning full time, part time, and contractor/vendors. They operate multiple massive buildings around Grand Canal, across product areas.

Not sure where you saw that they have no workers in IE?


> and yes Ireland.

I think you missed that bit so I edited it for clarity.

I am not saying they have no workers in Ireland, I am saying Ireland’s tax policy doesn’t increase the number of workers.

As the Alphabet shell corp has no workers. Alphabet itself does. It’s a 190,000 worker behemoth attracted by a cheap English speaking workforce in a reasonably close time zone.


Fair enough, to be clear, I completely agree that Alphabet is massively dodging taxes. Just that, they have a significant workforce unlike Apple.


Apple does a a significant workforce in Ireland ~6,000 people out of 22,000 in Europe. It’s their shell company that’s empty.

https://www.apple.com/ie/job-creation/

UK has ~6,500 so together over half their European employees are in English speaking countries which makes sense.




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