U2 Responds To Controversial Tax Manuever: 'Was It Totally Fair? Probably Not'

A recent U2 interview turned up a controversial topic that the band had not fully addressed until this week.

Speaking with The Guardian, the band addressed a controversial decision they made in 2006 to transfer U2 Ltd — its publishing royalties handler — from Ireland to the Netherlands to reduce its tax hit.

Once made public, the move resulted in protests at ensuing concerts and gave critics a gateway to smearing Bono's well-kept image as an activist with the peoples' best interests in mind.

But for all the hubbub, The Edge was pretty blasé when explaining the decision.

"Was it totally fair?" he asked. "Probably not. The perception is a gross distortion. We do pay a lot of tax. But if I was them I probably would have done the same, so it goes with the territory."

Bono insisted that nothing was kept hidden.

"All of our stuff is out in the open," he said. "How did people find out about it? Because it's published. The sneakiness is when you don't even know what's going on."

The conversation then shifted to Ireland's corporation-friendly tax laws, which The Guardian noted are currently the subject of an EU investigation.

"Look, Ireland is not going to back down on this," Bono said. "We are a tiny little country, we don't have scale, and our version of scale is to be innovative and to be clever, and tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we've known. That's how we got these [tech] companies here. Little countries, we don't have natural resources, we have to be able to attract people. We've been through the 50s and the 60s, and mass hemorrhaging of our population all over the world. There are more hospitals and firemen and teachers because of [Ireland's tax] policy."

So what's the solution?

"As a person who's spent nearly 30 years fighting to get people out of poverty, it was somewhat humbling to realise that commerce played a bigger job than development," he said. "I'd say that's my biggest transformation in 10 years: understanding the power of commerce to make or break lives, and that it cannot be given into as the dominating force in our lives."

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