and i bet nobody goes to jail in the end, and ultimately they end up profiting after paying it back
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.
16 billion dollars of money laundering isn’t an “honest mistake”…. criminal intent abounds
Coca-Cola is an evil company, so I’m not surprised. All they had to do was make cola, and be cool. Instead they operated like a criminal cartel, murdered labor activists in third world countries, exploited workers, bribed politicians, and evaded taxes. They should crumble under the weight of their crimes. If the government bails them out then we should all protest heavily.
I think it would be fair to destroy product you see in stores. something to weaken plastic on the outside of bottles, or shaking them. things that make product unsellable, or make it make a mess.
these companies are beyond evil, clearly simple “im not buying this” doesn’t work; retailers must be punished for stocking this shit.
If it’s on retail shelves, Coke already has their money. You have to aim higher.
they have their money once. will they have it again? and again? and after this KEEPS happening?
Your motivation is honorable, but this plan would only impact innocent retail employees and would not hurt Coca-Cola at all. I like your initiative, though.
their hours will be spent cleaning rather than doing the shit they originally needed to do. stores will need to hire more workers (and maybe security. but still) to keep the same standard. is wiping up cola really worse than collecting carts at 40c+?
Why would making a mess at a random 7-11 hurt Coca Cola in any way? What is the logic here?
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.
Always preferred Pepsi anyway.
looks at Pepsi’s record
Ah shit
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.
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.
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.
