Anonymous (213.193.162.x) 15 Oct 2007 16:59
I was reading a recent speech of McCreevy, where he was talking about taxes. Patents royalties can be viewed as taxes, so let's replace the word tax with patent royalties:
As you have said, taxes touch everyone's lives in one way or another. Certainly there has been no part of my adult life when taxes haven't been at the centre of what I have been doing: studying them, advising on them, legislating on them, levying them, spending them, and like everyone else suffering the pain of paying them.
For a brief time in the 1990s I was charged with the task of leading the opposition to them. I thought that that particular role was over when I ceased being opposition spokesman on Finance in 1997. But now, as my colleague Lazlo Kovacs will tell you, I do play a part-time opposition role in Brussels.
which gives:
As you have said, patent royalties touch everyone's lives in one way or another. Certainly there has been no part of my adult life when patent royalties haven't been at the centre of what I have been doing: studying them, advising on them, legislating on them, levying them, spending them, and like everyone else suffering the pain of paying them.
For a brief time in the 1990s I was charged with the task of leading the opposition to them. I thought that that particular role was over when I ceased being opposition spokesman on Finance in 1997. But now, as my colleague Lazlo Kovacs will tell you, I do play a part-time opposition role in Brussels.
And he is finishing with the Irish business model of tax haven:
And I can tell you this, Ireland needs people like you to get some important messages across to other Member States in Europe; in particular, those that are small and peripheral and for whom the opportunities to replicate the Irish economic model must not be closed by misguided proposals in the taxation area.
I think he is talking about the misguided tax strategy of Ireland, which promotes fiscal evasion for companies like Google or Microsoft.
