> It makes no sense to me. Of course companies are going to choose the most favorable location to incorporate. Counting on companies to be "fair-play" or whatever the politician word-of-the-day is seems completely braindead to me. Unless there were some kind of backroom deals going on, which wouldn't surprise me one bit coming from the EU nomeklatura, and now they're trying to conceal it by blaming "the rich" / "corporate greed".

So the issue is more around transfer pricing, which wasn't really a thing until relatively recently. This has a really, really large impact on services, particularly computer enabled services, whereas in a world where most GDP comes from goods it's not really as big a deal (as you can tax the value-add from a factory much easier than you can from a software sales deal).

Unfortunately, the big corporations put a lot of money into finding ways around whatever law you pass, and the EU are not united on this stuff, at all, at all.