and i bet nobody goes to jail in the end, and ultimately they end up profiting after paying it back
You assume they’re paying it back and don’t do some pittance of a public service instead.
This article is basically their public flogging, they’ve paid their dues and can reenter society
For this to be criminal it’d probably require intent to be proven which is difficult without a “smoking gun” of an email being like “do this to avoid taxes or be fired”- CEO. For it just to be civil fines is a lot simpler to show. Their inevitable appeal and potential reduction in fine is a different issue.
Which is hilarious because ignorance is not a defence for poor people.
the poor are not, according to the american criminal system; ‘people’. mutually exclusive categories.
Of course they have intent. That’s not an issue at all. They’re trying to avoid taxes, which is in itself legal, and they aren’t denying that. Their theory is that the IRS is doing the math wrong.
It almost sounds like you’re saying corporations are not people. Don’t let the conservatives hear you say that.
16 billion dollars of money laundering isn’t an “honest mistake”…. criminal intent abounds
Sure but that’s a lot harder to prove.
Always preferred Pepsi anyway.
looks at Pepsi’s record
Ah shit
I thought child slaves are good because more profit? /s
Water is not problematic (except for at least four fifths of bottled water)
With a wink and a nudge, transactions are often structured to shift profits from high-tax countries to low-tax countries to cut their tax bills. The most popular target for transfer pricing abuse is intangible property, including licenses for manufacturing, distribution, sale, marketing, and promotion of products in overseas markets. Since intangible property doesn’t really have a physical home—unlike, say, real estate—it’s easy to transfer it to countries that offer certain benefits, including more favorable tax treatment. (That’s what’s in dispute in the Coca-Cola case.)
Ugh
The intangible property for coke is a secret recipe that is preserved in some vault in the US. There’s no transfer of IP here and that’s not what’s in dispute.
The facts are centred around the profitability of concentrate producers that earn the super profits. Operating entities and the US makes a slim margin.
You can read a better informed analysis here.
The dispute centres on Coke subsidiaries in Ireland, Brazil, Eswatini and four other countries that manufacture concentrate, the syrup that gets mixed with carbonated water to make drinks such as Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite. The subsidiaries sit between the US parent company, which owns the brands, and the bottling companies that make the final product.
The company routinely shifted production of concentrate to countries with favourable tax rates, the US tax court found. The subsidiary in Ireland, which had a tax rate as low as 1.4 per cent, at one point shipped to bottlers in 90 countries.
Unlike independent contract manufacturers, which typically have low margins, an IRS analysis found these Coke subsidiaries were unusually profitable — earning a return on assets two-and-a-half times that of the US parent company that owns the iconic brands. By controlling how much the subsidiaries must pay other parts of the Coke network for use of the brands and marketing, and by setting the prices they can charge bottlers, Coke itself in effect decided their profitability, the court heard.
Those profit levels were “astronomical”, Judge Albert Lauber wrote in an initial ruling in 2020.
The company routinely shifted production of concentrate to countries with favourable tax rates
Manufacturing is different than IP transfers.
the US parent company that owns the iconic brands. By controlling how much the subsidiaries must pay other parts of the Coke network for use of the brands and marketing, and by setting the prices they can charge bottlers, Coke itself in effect decided their profitability, the court heard
IP is owned by the US. What they’re describing is transfer pricing. Subsidiaries are owned by coke hence by definition coke sets the prices under which the US charges for their IP. It’s tax advantageous to charge a low amount to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions.
Numbers look massive but overall not large enough. Coke is gigantic and the dispute spans multiple years. The IRS hasn’t always covered themselves in glory and they may still fumble a technical aspect on the burden of proof.
Interesting to see it unfold but coke has a history of environmental, business and humane malpractices. This is just another outcome of such business model.
Fun fact, these back taxes are higher than the share value of the entire company (~$11bn market cap).
Edit: I was misled by this site. The cap is much larger, and my fact was not fun.
Good. I hope it hurts.
But it’s only back taxes on profits we know about
Sure, it might be prudent to always assume any reported white collar crimes are at least one order of magnitude greater than we get to know. That said, I was really impressed with their stock ticker company description blurb where they strive to “honor God” in all their works.
Assuming they’re referring to the Christian God, a selfish, emotionally unstable mega toddler, their behavior would be appropriate.
Do people upvote these comments without checking anything? Does it sound reasonable for one of the largest companies in the world to be worth only $11 billion?
The Coca-Cola Company is worth $296 billion. I don’t think they’ve been worth only $11 billion since the '80s.
I’m going to stop using this site, as it currently states a market cap of “11,091,895,682” dollars. Thanks for the correction.
That’s a US bottling company that buys from the actual Coca-Cola Company.
The company was formerly known as Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated and changed its name to Coca-Cola Consolidated, Inc. in January 2019.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/COKE/profile/
These bottling companies are the ones that beat people up in developing countries, not the actual manufacturer. They can be confusing.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Well, I at least stand by my earlier point, that white collar crime is usually way worse than is ever reported.
This sort of stuff is why the corporate veil needs to be abolished. If they’re not criminals, then they can buy insurance.
Anyone who tells me “there’s not enough money to go around” in the future is getting punched. I don’t care if I catch an assault charge. That propaganda was bullshit the first time I heard it and it’s always been propaganda.
Did you know it doesn’t even have cocaine in it anymore? What a ripoff!
Coca Cola ensured that international drug laws grant them an exception to use real coca leaves (with the cocaine extracted from them first). Oddly enough, they could still make their cola taste the same without the leaves. The reason they still use them is because they likely wouldn’t be allowed to call it “coca” cola if it had no coca leaves. The name was so recognizable that they asked for an exception to drug laws rather than change the name of their drink.
The other reason is they make a good profit selling medicinal cocaine.
Branding is one helluva drug
Sounds like an excuse to extract cocaine to me
Eh, works for me. BRB, making a new product called coca tea, for the… uh… tea.
When did they quit putting cocaine it? If I’d known that then I wouldn’t have been buying it anymore!
Around 120 years ago, give or take
The fact that there are so many legal loopholes to use to save from paying taxes, the fact they go this far to avoid taxes is disgusting.
When you’re a billion dollar company, It’s cheaper to bribe politicians than it is to pay taxes.
There’s a supreme Court judge right now who was giving companies favorable laws for like a pack of twizzlers.
How would that help! Coke sells cola, not Twizzlers! /s
it is just an inevitable consequence of money and lobby based politics. Whoever contributed to turn US elections into something like a pro wrestling match event is to blame
I wish they’d pay the taxes in the country the drinks were bought. Even if the US manages to scrape back some, that’s only one country seeing the taxes owed.
I’m so sick of companies taking every opportunity to be egregiously shitty in the name of profit.
These are the incentives of the economic system. Are you up for radical change? We can’t rely on companies choosing to be moral and nice.
We need workers to own the economy.
We need workers to own the economy
We need an economic system that rewards acting in the common good. This system, but with the workers in charge is still this system which rewards all the bad stuff of modern capitalism
A single owner-dictator is less likely to make decisions for the common good than all employees owning their workplaces together.
Socialism, however it’s implemented (besides state capitalism a la China, which also isn’t socialist), necessarily moves us closer to what you’re saying.
You know there’s a range of options between unfettered capitalism and unfettered communism right?
Slap communism on a population that’s spent the past few generations training itself to reward cunts and you get the USSR on steroids.
Worker ownership over the economy doesn’t just mean communism. There are various socialist and anarchist approaches as well, and like you say a spectrum in-between.
There are even capitalist compatible options like workers cooperatives or novel solutions like mandating unions and union participation on the board.
I didn’t say we need to implement communism, you did. But I’m down!
I’m equally sick of pretty much every sports stadium, event venue, theme park, cruise ship, etc. offering these companies’ beverages and all the consumers in the world that really don’t withhold from supporting these companies, despite their obvious shittiness.
Trust me… the astronomical amounts that they have found is nothing compared to what they didn’t find…
Mansions and yachts made of painted bill stacks
Coca Cola also sponsors this event:
Meta and Koch Industries to Sponsor Event Featuring Climate Denier Barry Cooper
Now do Cargill, Tyson, etc al.
A bit off topic, but US Coke tastes like shit
I’m pretty sure it’s because the use of absurd amounts of high fructose corn syrup. There’s 39g (can’t confirm, I got it from Google) of sugar in a 12oz (340ml) can. US soda is pretty much just carbonated high fructose corn syrup water with a bit of flavoring. There’s probably other significant differences too since the US has barely the minimum food safety laws.
Can confirm: HFCS makes everything taste awful and I feel awful afterwards. It also doesn’t satisfy my hunger/thirst the way cane sugar does, which is very concerning.
I only ever buy CocaCola (on special occasions) when it’s imported from Mexico, since that’s still made with cane sugar. This is nuts since it 1) costs more 2) is an American company whose product is being shipped back to us 3) is a superior product but has to be made elsewhere for “reasons.”
As if the US is the only country drinking flavored HFCS… 🙄
Quick googling shows that China, HK, Singapore, Malaysia, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Australia, UK, etc use real sugar
Yeah. Colombian is better.
Willing to bet the 16 bn is not really a year and a half of profits lol
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They’ll just…raise prices to offset the judgment.
And lots of people will stop drinking it because of that, and they will be healthier thanks to it.
I know quite a few people who have serious Coke addictions. They will simply refuse to drink any other brand and they go through Trumpian levels of the stuff daily. I don’t know what it is about this particular brand. I’ve never met an RC head, but Coke heads are a dime a dozen, unlike the ten bucks a dozen their drug of choice charges.
I know quite a few people who have serious Coke addictions.
That’s a great way to start a paragraph
I’ve known pepsi addicts.
lived with a woman who drank a 12 pack a day. IDK how she has teeth
I used to be like that. Drank 4 litres a day. Thankfully I got sick of feeling like shit all the time because of it and switched to just drinking water.
Mountain Dew. Has more caffeine than coffee.
Touche
I never got into that in my teen years because we had Jolt Cola - branded as “all the sugar and twice the caffeine”
Edit: Now I wonder if people were going into bars back then and ordering a Jack and Jolt, thereby far preceding the Red Bull and vodka.
I remember those, Red Bull. Drank a few, but didn’t notice any side effects.
Speaking of the Red Bull, one of my ex-girlfriends categorized them perfectly: “It looks and tastes like a diuretic’s piss.” And her father was a MD who specialized in diabetes.
Does it? Mountain dew has like 50-60mg of caffeine per 12 oz can, where an average 8oz cup of coffee can have somewhere in the 75-100mg range. A standard double shot espresso drink will have anywhere from 75-150mg.
Also, I don’t think the caffeine content is the thing to worry about at any rate, I’m more concerned with the 46g of sugar per can.
Fwiw… Mt Dew Zero has 68mg/12oz. I think regular and diet are 55ish.
I may be wrong, and talking out of my ass, but I know it has a lot of caffeine.
Anecdote warning: I, due to my autism, get fixated on certain foods, hobbies, whatever, etc. On a job I worked, I decided I liked Mountain Dew for 4 or 5 days, and “wore it out” in American Southern parlance, and then abandoned it. A day later, I noticed I got a headache around 2 PM everyday, for 2 or 3 days.
I said to my coworker in the truck “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, do I have a brain tumor or am I about to have a stroke?”
She said “It’s those fucking Mountain Dews you drank for days. They’re loaded with caffeine.”
I’ve avoided them since. But the Code Red Mountain Dews are delicious.
Uff that used to be me. I went cold turkey for about 4 month of just drinking water. It then made me realize how coke isn’t even good.
I stopped drinking soda years ago, but I never actively chose to do so. Somehow, it just happened. Definitely to my benefit, but I’ve long been perplexed how it happened.
Lol doubt.
And cut wages at the bottom end of the employment ladder, gotta safeguard that C-suite bonus
The CFO, who originally manufactured the tax dodge and got a bonus for doing so, will now have to work out a “restructuring” strategy (IE, cut wages and layoffs) to cover for the increased tax burden… Which will earn them another bonus.
Edit: I don’t know that any of this is true
we must never take any action against companies they’ll just raise prices or leave the country or fire everyone or or or or or
If they really have you so much by the balls then they’re a threat and need to be taken down
Keep going, I’m listening.
All my comment was saying is that this is a toothless judgment.
Getting 16 billion in back taxes isn’t toothless… It’s making them pay their fair share…
Toothless would be if there was no way to force them to pay.
it’s better than nothing, and Coke has competitors that aren’t getting fined, so their hands are somewhat tied
By less than the profit that was taxed, because elasticity exists.
Thank you friend
