Comment Re:It's simply tax avoidance (Score 1) 209
Because large companies lobbied to have laws written up so that the companies are allowed to move money to different jurisdictions as expenses, the lawmakers wrote the laws, and had them enacted. It's not just in the EU that this happens. It occurs everywhere in the world where the corporate taxes are high (well, higher than 0%) and money is funnelled in tax havens, including South Dakota in the US (which the US conveniently never mentions).
The corporations aren't doing anything illegal. If the lawmakers are so upset about this then all they have to do is enact laws that stop the false transfer of license fees to the tax havens. For example, state that the license fees must go to where they intellectual property was created. So, in Apples' case they would not be allowed to transfer the license fees to some tax haven but would, most likely, have to send it to the US, specifically California, as they say all of their products are designed in California. No global minimum tax rate required. It respects the intellectual property. Probably putting a proper value on it instead of the inflated values now used to transfer funds to tax havens. Just that change alone might see more money kept in other countries because less would be transferred to the country of origin of the intellectual property.
Ideally, these companies would be paying income tax in each country that they generate sales in. Of course then you still have the US coming in and claiming income tax from US companies on their worldwide sales.