The Irish Sunday Business Post today carries two articles about PayPal. In the first it states that PayPal have relocated “a significant portion of its business to Singapore for accounting and taxation purposes“. This follows on from PayPal establishing a Bank in Luxembourg to which all European PayPal accounts were transferred to on 2nd July this year.
The move to Singapore is part of an ongoing “tax realignment” and results in all of PayPal International’s business now being outside Europe with the exception of their intellectual property functions. Royalties from intellectual property are not taxed in Ireland, under a tax break designed to attract multinationals to Ireland. “Geographic Tax Savings” was referred to in the Investors conference call on 18th July and it’s no surprise a company the size of PayPal and eBay use different tax regimes to their advantage.
So has this resulted in job losses in Ireland? Not in the slightest – Day to day business carries on as normal, it’s just a holding company in Singapore. The second article refers to PayPal declining government grant assistance to open new offices in Sligo, Ireland. Instead they’ve decided to locate them in Dublin as it offers easier access to a larger pool of potential employees. With 1200 currently on the payroll and up to another 200 vacancies in the new PayPal location the move to Singapore makes little difference to PayPal and eBay being a significant Irish employer.
4 Responses
The Irish Sunday business post, although generally well respected, is pretty much considered “the Sun wot has red the FT” when it comes to stories that dont relate to its traditional domain of stories about Ryanair , Heinz, or the Guinness group.
They’re old men, they dont understand this “electronic sales phenomenon”. They reckon it’ll just pass.
I think this is another example of the greed of this company, so much for their espoused community values, where it is not prepared to contribute to the economies of the countries that support it.
Im no huge fan of ebay or Paypal’s modes of operation, Keith , but in this case, the ISBP have run a “non-story”.
‘Pay-Bay’ can be faulted for many many things, but not contributing to Ireland’s economy isn’t one of them..
The polite refusal of the mooted Paypal move to Sligo is less to do with ingratitude on the part of ebay, and more to do with the Irish Government making loud empty noises about rural re-structuring, and pushing Ireland’s economy (Traditionally rooted around Dublin in the ‘affluent east’ ) towards the west.
(accurate, but not identical scenarios would be if an established “in the city” financial institution were to be offered a paltry sum by a U.K. Government body to expand their operations, on condition they built a new H.Q. in , say, Carlisle, & run 80% of their day-to-day operations from there, after uprooting from London’s financial district; or a Sillicon Valley company being offered a small grant to re-locate to Washington state, because they “dont make computers there”. Well , duh….)
It isn’t viable, and Paypal were fully within their rights to refuse this ham-handed Government cajoling.
Again, it’s just a non-story.
Another non story is me calling Ken “keith”. Ooops. Sorry.