Apple have been ordered to pay a monster sum in back taxes by the European Union Commission after receiving ‘illegal state aid’ in Ireland.
As reported by The Guardian, the multi-national tech firm has been told they owe €13 billion (roughly £11bn) in back taxes – a figure that ironically is so large it won’t actually fit on the screen of your iPhone calculator app…
Apple essentially avoided tax on product sales across the EU’s single market by registering them in Ireland to a ‘head office’ that existed on paper alone, as opposed to where they were actually sold.
And to put the figure into perspective, here is what that money could buy you…
For the £11bn figure reported, you could buy 123 Paul Pogbas for the £89.3 million fee Manchester United paid.
Or if you’re a Liverpool fan, you could fire your team to Premier League mediocrity with the signing of 314 Andy Carrolls at £35m a pop – what a steal…
According to Mic, the average cost of one episode of Game of Thrones is $6m -roughly £4.5m.
So with the pocket change Apple owe in the EU, the HBO hit could be kept on air for another 2,444 episodes – no chance of George R.R. Martin’s writing keeping up with that kind of pace though…
If space travel were your goal then why not build your own Space Shuttle Endeavour – or better still 8.48 Space Shuttles for £1,296,556,878 each.
But what is the point in having eight and a half space shuttles if you can’t fly them. With £11bn you could launch one shuttle into orbit 32 times at a cost of around £343m per mission.
The UFC recently changed hands for a cool £3bn – so with Apple’s back taxes, the organisation could be bought another 3.6 times…
With prices starting in the UK at £260,040, you could build a convoy of Lamborghini Aventadors – 42,301 of them to be precise…
According to Aid for Africa, it costs about £495 per year to send a child to high school in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
So with the cash that Apple believes they don’t owe, over 22 million kids in Africa could have received education for a year.
Apple claim there is ‘no basis in fact or law’ but if they opt to pay their tax rather than threatening the livelihoods of European workers, they could try to sell 23,965,141 iPhone 6 handsets at £459 each to plug the gap.
Obviously, there would be tax on those handsets too, so they should probably round it up to an even 24 million sales instead, just to be sure…
