Earlier today, the U.S. Treasury released a White Paper responding to the EU state aid cases, brought (or possibly to be brought in the future) by the European Commission. These cases, while generally still pending, would require mainly US companies (although also Fiat) to disgorge tax benefits that they got from accommodating EU countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg,
This blog entry is just a placeholder to say that I am going to be commenting on this. Indeed, EU press interest is such that I will shortly be talking to an Irish reporter and doing a BBC TV interview. But I may also write a short piece on it - for example, to publish in a forthcoming IBDF volume concerning OECD-BEPS and the EU state aid cases, that's based on a tax conference in Amsterdam earlier this summer, at which I spoke. Said piece would appear
My view on this may not make me a lot of US friends. In brief, while I accept that it is probably in the national self-interest of the US to make these arguments (in the hope that they will cause the EU to back off), I do not, in the main, find the arguments intellectually persuasive.
UPDATE: The interviews were fun. Since I was feeling pretty frisky, I suspect that I will be quoted in a forthcoming Irish Times article by Simon Carswell, and perhaps on a BBC-TV news show tonight. It's easier to speak well to the press when one is particularly interested in and engaged by a topic.
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