New York Times’ Columnist Calls Tim Cook a Liar

By: Jeff Stewart  |   May 24th, 2013   |   Apple, News

The recent testimony from Apple’s CEO in front of the US Senate Subcommittee has saved the Cupertino-based company from penalty but it could not save Cook from the New York Times’ Joe Nocera’s anger. The columnist bluntly called the CEO of Apple a liar in his latest column that was published on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. Commenting on Nocera’s anger towards Cook, Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune said that Joe is an old critic of Apple, as he has a long history with the company. But recently Nocera has made it “his business to be the fiercest critic of what he sees as shady business dealings at the company’s highest levels.”

 

According to Nocera the reason behind his anger was that Cook told a “whopper” and a “flat-out lie” while he was under oath. In addition to this, to support his claims, Nocera gave the reference of numerous news articles and documents. In spite of this Elmer-DeWitt believes that Nocera is quite possibly wrong. Here are few extracts from Nocera’s column, which will give you a good idea what the columnist actually thinks about Cook’s statement in front of the Subcommittee:

 

“Even though the company appears to pay about 10 percent of its pretax income in taxes — when the federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent — Cook said, “We pay all the taxes we owe — every single dollar.” He added that Apple had never shifted any of its American profits to an offshore tax haven when, in fact, that is basically what it has done, routing tens of billions in pretax profits to a shell corporation in Ireland that exists solely to avoid taxes in the United States. He even said that the low taxes Apple pays overseas is on the profits of its overseas sales. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was a flat-out lie.

 

Here is another whopper from Mr. Cook on Tuesday. He said that his company not only doesn’t violate the letter of the law, that it doesn’t even violate the spirit. He may be right on the first part, but he is wrong on the second.

 

Question for the government of Ireland: Do you really want your country to be known as an offshore tax haven? Indeed, at a time when your citizens are dealing with the pain of an austerity program, how can you justify allowing Apple to pay virtually no taxes on a subsidiary established solely to avoid taxes in the United States? Just wondering. [The Irish government denies these claims.]”

 

Elmer-DeWitt revealed that the relationship of Nocera with Apple can be judged from a telephonic conversation, which Joe had with late Steve Jobs in 2008:

 

““This is Steve Jobs,” [Jobs] began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.””

 

Source: iPhoneinCanada

Photo: NYTExaminer