IRELAND’S Cabinet agreed Friday to join Apple in appealing against a multi-billion-euro back tax demand that the European Commission has imposed on the iPhone maker, despite misgivings among independents who back the fragile coalition.

    The commission’s ruling last week that the U.S. tech giant must pay up to 13 billion euros (US$14.5 billion) to Dublin has angered Washington, which accuses the EU of trying to grab tax revenue that should go to the U.S. Government.

    With transatlantic tensions rising, the White House said President Barack Obama would raise the issue of tax avoidance by some multinational corporations at the summit of the G20 leading economies in China over the weekend.

    Paradoxically, Ireland is determined not to accept the tax windfall, which would be equivalent to what it spent last year on funding its struggling health service.

    Finance Minister Michael Noonan has insisted Dublin would fight any adverse ruling ever since the European Union began investigating Apple’s Irish tax affairs in 2014, arguing that it had to protect a tax regime that has attracted large numbers of multinational employers.

    On Wednesday, he failed to persuade a group of independent lawmakers, whose support is vital for the minority government, to agree to fight the ruling by European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager that Apple’s low tax arrangements in Ireland constitute illegal state aid.

    However, he won them over when the Cabinet met again Friday. Noonan said the retroactive nature of the EU ruling was “little short of bizarre and outrageous.”

    Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe said Dublin stood behind its corporate tax regime as a means of creating jobs.

    Apple, keen to defend its own interests, has already said it will lodge an appeal. For Fine Gael, the main Irish coalition party, a broader principle is at stake. It wants to take on Brussels to safeguard Ireland’s decades-old low corporate tax policy that has drawn in multinationals such as Apple, creating one in 10 jobs in what was once an impoverished country.

    Apple was found to be holding over US$181 billion in accumulated profits offshore, more than any U.S. firm, in a study published last year by two left-leaning nonprofit groups, a policy critics say is designed to avoid paying U.S taxes.

    But Apple chief executive Tim Cook has said part of the company’s 2014 tax bill would be paid next year when the company repatriates offshore profits to the United States.(SD-Agencies)