Mr. Derek Moran:

Let me put it this way. I find them in general to be good corporate citizens, with widespread employment. There has been the Apple case. These European-level investigations are very complex. They are venturing into territory that, at one level, is quite surprising. We just have to see how it pans out. As I said, the Netherlands has already said it is appealing the adjudication against it, although I understand the Directorate-General for Competition is starting a new case concerning McDonalds in Luxembourg, so it goes on. We are two years in since they started gathering this information. It is part of a general trawl around Europe, and the particular case has not gone forward.

An interesting aspect is that testimony was given to the finance committee of the US Senate by Bob Stack, who is the deputy assistant secretary for international taxes, raising a lot of issues. The US is not at all a disinterested party in this. So it goes beyond Ireland. It goes beyond Europe and it reaches out to the US. Some of the points he was making were, first, that the US is somewhat worried about the over-concentration on US companies by DG COMP; second, that it interferes with its bilateral tax treaties with individual countries, because it does not have a tax treaty with Brussels per se; and also, the risk at the end of the day that retrospective imposition will be regarded as a credit by US companies and ultimately will become a bill on the US taxpayer, among other things. So that was very interesting testimony in that regard. It goes way beyond Europe.

In terms of the overall - I do not like the term "demonisation"-----