U2's Tax Avoidance Is Supported And Encouraged By ANCAPS!

Last edited by CovOps on Sun Mar 01, 2009 5:28 am; edited 1 time in total

In an interview published on Friday in The Irish Times, two members of U2, Bono and The Edge, said that criticism of the band’s decision to move part of its business out of Ireland after the country ended its tax-free deal for artists was unfair. Bono told the newspaper that “the thing that stung us was the accusation of hypocrisy for my work as an activist.”

As The Irish Times explains, the band has largely refused to comment on the controversy, which started nearly three years ago:

In 2006, U2 moved part of their business from Ireland to The Netherlands, where the tax rate on royalty earnings is far lower than in this country. This followed an Irish Government decision to limit tax-free earnings for artists. Prior to this, all artistic earnings had been tax-free. Now artists would have to pay tax on earnings over 250,000 euros.

Criticism of the band’s business decision from fellow Irish residents with less elaborate tax arrangements started almost immediately. As Slate noted in 2006, Fergal O’Brien of Bloomberg News began an article from Dublin this way:

Bono, the rock star and campaigner against Third World debt, is asking the Irish government to contribute more to Africa. At the same time, he’s reducing tax payments that could help fund that aid.

After what was probably not a long search, Mr. O’Brien also found the H word being used on the streets of Dublin. “In U2’s position, it does come across as quite hypocritical,” one woman evidently told him.

Though it boomed for years, the Irish economy is now reeling from the global economic slowdown, and new attention is being paid there to disparities between rich and poor. In that light, a group of activists called the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland has begun a campaign calling on U2 “to put their money where their mouth is and support global tax justice,” according to a statement on their Web site.

On Wednesday, the coalition staged a small but media-friendly protest outside the Irish finance ministry, featuring a Bono impersonator singing a mock version of the band’s hit “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” with new lyrics:

I know avoiding tax ain’t fair,
it’s just because I’m a millionaire,
I don’t need to pay like you,
no, I won’t pay like you. [...]
‘Cause I still will not pay to end poverty.”

After suggesting to Brian Lenihan, the finance minister, that he “ask Bono to pay his fair share of taxes,” Paul O’Toole, who played the role of Bono in the protest, told The Irish Times:

Their music does not bother me. It is their policy of avoiding tax that bothers me. Bono talks about dead kids, but he won’t pay a penny towards it.

In the interview published on Friday, the band’s two leading members defended themselves, and their decision not to talk about the issue. The Edge told the newspaper, “We don’t comment on it for a very good reason, and that’s because it’s our own private thing.” He added: “We do business all over the world, we pay taxes all over the world and we are totally tax compliant.”

Bono mounted a somewhat more robust defense. “We pay millions and millions of dollars in tax,” he said, and went on to defend the group’s right to act as any other business would. According to Bono, it is his critics in Ireland who are being hypocritical, because the country benefited greatly in recent years from offering low tax rates to attract foreign businesses to the country. U2, in his view, is simply availing itself of Dutch laws that do the same thing for the Netherlands. As he told The Irish Times:

What’s actually hypocritical is the idea that then you couldn’t use a financial services center in Holland. The real question people need to ask about Ireland’s tax policy is: ‘Was the nation a net gain benefactor?’ and of course it was — hugely so. So there was no hypocrisy for me –- we’re just part of a system that has benefited the nation greatly and that’s a system that will be closed down in time. Ireland will have to find other ways of being competitive and attractive.

That answer is not likely to satisfy critics of the band’s tax arrangements, even as attention turns to the band’s new album, which was released today (excerpts are available on the Irish Times Web site). In what may be a sign that he is not completely unscathed by the criticism, Bono himself raised the H word in a discussion of the new music on the “Today” radio program on the BBC, telling John Wilson on Tuesday:

Probably the biggest thing I’ve had to take on is [...] my own hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy of every human heart, which is there. And that’s finally your subject matter, and its hard to go back to, “goodies and baddies,” when you finally discover that.

Update: Hard to argue with reader JT’s comment in the thread below:

Here’s the thing that is so interesting about this debate: Bono is labeled a hypocrite because he invests huge amounts of his time, reputation, and assets to help people less fortunate than him. When his business does what many other businesses have done, he’s targeted and ridiculed. But, if Bono wasn’t involved in charitable work at all and just raked in the money, spending it on champagne and fast cars, this would probably never had surfaced as an issue. SO, IN ESSENCE, BONO IS FACES CRITICISM ONLY BECAUSE HE DEVOTES SO MUCH ENERGY TO CHARITABLE WORK. That is sad. Rather than throw mud at Bono, why not look at the underlying tax system in Ireland and the EU and try fix what people clearly believe are loopholes.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/u2-respond-to-critics-of-their-deal-with-the-taxman/?src=SkimWO

Go U2!

FUCK THE TAXMAN!

Fuck the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland

You filthy maggots!

Totally ignorant of the fact that tax is theft, you have the audacity to demand that individuals and companies be extorted from...

Your organization should be confiscated or destroyed...

Evil, ignorant scum!

:Fuck Governmen

CovOps wrote:: Go U2!

FUCK THE TAXMAN!

:thumb u-p:

U2's Tax Avoidance Is Supported And Encouraged By ANCAPS!

U2's Tax Avoidance Is Supported And Encouraged By ANCAPS!

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