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Business Daily

Paradise Papers: Apple's Secret Tax Bolthole

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4816 Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2017

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There's been another round of revelations from the Paradise Papers - the leaked documents from a big offshore law firm. The leaks put Apple's tax affairs under scrutiny. The company shopped around for a tax haven after a crackdown on its controversial tax practices in Ireland. The BBC's Andrew Walker explains the background and Manuela Saragosa asks tax specialist Rita de la Feria, professor of tax law at the University of Leeds, whether it is possible to create a level playing field for tax globally. Also in the programme: Daniel Gallas reports from Brazil two years after the country's worst ever environmental accident. On November 5th 2015, a dam operated by the iron ore company Samarco - a joint venture between commodity giants Vale and BHP Biliton - burst in the town of Mariana. Two years on, has the region's economy recovered? (Picture: The Apple logo is displayed on the exterior of an Apple Store in San Francisco. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

0:09.7

Coming up, how the tech giant Apple has continued to avoid paying billions in taxes.

0:14.8

It's the latest in the so-called Paradise Papers leak on the tax habits of the powerful and wealthy.

0:20.3

But can there ever be a level playing

0:22.2

field around the world when it comes to tax? The system is fundamentally rigged at this moment in time.

0:27.8

And we need to address that imbalance that allows essentially some people to pay taxes and others

0:34.6

not to pay taxes. And two years on from Brazil's worst environmental disaster, ruining a river and a region,

0:41.5

there's no relief for fishermen.

0:43.8

This is a factory of alcoholism. Bars are full of miserable fishermen.

0:48.5

If the fisherman is not allowed to fish, what can he do? His life has cut short.

0:53.3

That's all in Business Daily from the BBC.

0:57.7

There's been another round of revelations from the Paradise Papers. They're the leaked documents

1:02.9

from a big offshore law firm and they put the matter of tax avoidance under the spotlight once

1:08.0

again. In a moment, will global tax holds ever be closed, or is it mission impossible?

1:15.6

But first, the latest leaks mean Apple's tax affairs are again under scrutiny.

1:20.0

Our economics correspondent Andrew Walker has been looking at the details.

1:23.7

Well, the company appears to have shopped round for a new tax haven after there was a crackdown on its tax practices in Ireland.

1:33.4

If you remember, what it did in Ireland was that it had revenues from sales outside the US were channeled through companies in Ireland but that were effectively stateless for tax purposes and so they were subject

1:45.6

to essentially very, very little tax. Ireland came under an awful lot of pressure within the European

1:50.6

Union over this arrangement and did decide to eliminate it. Now Apple wanted to find a new offshore

1:57.1

home and its legal advisers went so far as to send a questionnaire to the firm at the

2:01.3

centre of the leak. That firm, incidentally, is named Appleby. There's the similarity of

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