The Daily Telegraph appears to have tapped out the angle of an Apple press release rather than looking for the real news.
It ran a yarn about how Apple is going to spend a more than a billion dollars within the EU with lots of quotable quotes from Apple's CEO Tim Cook. The case is apparently going to be spent on new data centres.
However the Telegraph failed to check what the timing of the release or what it might mean. Apple is currently banging heads with the EU over consumer law and tax evasion. Apple is clearly trying to say to the EU "look what we are doing for you and wouldn't it be terrible if we had to abandon these projects.
The EU would be off not listening to those sorts of "threats."
In fact if Apple paid tax like normal companies it would pay considerably more than a billion euro. It would also not be money that it would get back (it would be helping Europeans get health and welfare benefits) so it could not invest in new data centres.
Apple has had problems back home with its data centres not producing the sorts of benefits for local communities that do not justify the tax-breaks both in terms of its green claims and the jobs it actually provides.
