The Finance Bill, the legislation intended to give effect to the measures outlined in Budget 2015, was published yesterday. Under some of the measures contained in the Bill, any Vodafone shareholder here receiving a dividend of less than €1,000 from Vodafone following its recent decision to return cash to investors will have no tax liability provided they opted to receive the money as a capital payment rather than as income. That will provide some relief to the hundreds of thousands of former Eircom shareholders here who received some Vodafone shares when Eircom sold its mobile division Eircell to Vodafone.
Feargal O'Rourke, head of PwC's tax services practice, has been looking at some of the other measures contained in the bill, which at 26 pages is somewhat smaller than bills of previous years. Mr O'Rourke says more details about the measures announced in the Budget around the foreign earnings deduction, which sees Irish export companies with people on the road being able to get a tax rebate. This was expanded hugely to include more countries, especially in the Middle East and Far East.
The bill also gave more details on the extension of SARP, the Special Assignee Relief Programme. But Mr O'Rourke also says the bill gets down to the more minutiae details of measures which were not announced in the Budget. These include tax rules in relation to Approved Retirement Funds. He says that anyone who has an ARF pension fund of less than €2m had to draw down 5% of that fund every year. With longevity increasing, people were starting to worry whether their fund would actually run out of money at some point. But Mr Noonan announced yesterday that people only have to draw down 4% of that fund if a person is aged between 60 and 70 - giving people a little bit of comfort that their fund won't run out. The Minister also reduced VAT on golf green fees for non-members of clubs.
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Mark Roden, founder of the mobile payments firm Ding has been named the EY overall Entrepreneur of the Year. Ding enables mobile credit to be transferred between phones across the world. It has processed $600m worth of mobile top-up transfers to users in over 100 different countries many of them people from poorer countries working overseas and sending credit to loved ones in their home nation.
Mr Roden says that for people in emerging markets, mobile phones enable them to access information and a propped up mobile phone is "a source of incredible life-changing opportunity". Mr Roden says that Ding now employs 200 people in Dublin, Dubai, Miami and El Salvador. The company is now transferring one mobile top-up every second. To make its money, the company takes a small percentage of every mobile top-up transferred. The Ding boss says the company now has a great opportunity for expansion, adding that it is very exciting to be part of such a fast growing business.
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MORNING BRIEFS - Permanent TSB may have to raise up to a €1 billion in fresh capital following the publication of the European Central Bank's stress tests on Sunday. PTSB, and the other banks, have already been given the results of the tests but these will not be made public until Sunday morning. It is expected PTSB will fail what is known as the "adverse scenario" in the stress tests. That means the ECB has deemed that in the event of a financial crisis the bank would not have enough capital to absorb the resulting losses and will have to raise more.
*** Amazon is to locate a new data centres in Germany for its corporate clients to assuage their fears over spying by US and British security agencies. Amazon hosts internet services for many leading companies. It has been under pressure from them following revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the US National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ snooping on private information held on servers in their jurisdictions. Germany is seen to have some of Europe's most robust privacy laws and to offer much greater protection to private information.
