BTW News Briefs

European Commission Rules Against Tax Advantages Given to Starbucks, Fiat

This week, the European Commission ruled as illegal under EU state aid rules selective tax advantages given by Luxembourg and the Netherlands to Fiat Finance and Trade and Starbucks, respectively. Following in-depth investigations, which were launched in June 2014, the Commission concluded that Luxembourg had granted selective tax advantages to Fiat’s financing company and the Netherlands to Starbucks’ coffee roasting company.  In each case, a tax ruling issued by the respective national tax authority artificially lowered the tax paid by the company.

“Tax rulings that artificially reduce a company’s tax burden are not in line with EU state aid rules,” said EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy, in a statement. “They are illegal. I hope that, with today’s decisions, this message will be heard by Member State governments and companies alike. All companies, big or small, multinational or not, should pay their fair share of tax.”

The New York Times noted that European authorities are also looking into Luxembourg’s low-tax arrangement with Amazon as well as Apple’s business in Ireland.

The European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF) announced its strong support for the decision by the Commission. “Local retailers who pay their taxes properly and therefore add value to their municipalities and the local communities can hardly compete with major international retailers practicing tax avoidance,” said Dr. Kyra Dreher, EIBF co-president and managing director of the Retail Booksellers Committee, Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, in a statement. “Consumers and societies benefit when retailers are operating on a level playing field and there is healthy competition among them.”

The Commission has ordered Luxembourg and the Netherlands to recover the unpaid tax from Fiat and Starbucks, respectively, in order to remove the unfair competitive advantage they have enjoyed and to restore equal treatment with other companies in similar situations. The amounts to be recovered are €20 - €30 million for each company. It also means that the companies can no longer continue to benefit from the advantageous tax treatment granted by these tax rulings.

2015 Kirkus Prize Winners Announced

Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of its second annual Kirkus Prize on October 15 at a ceremony at the Four Seasons Residences in Austin, Texas. Each of the winners is awarded a prize of $50,000.

The Kirkus Prize for Fiction went to A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday), a novel that details three decades in the intertwined personal lives of four men who meet as college roommates and move to New York. A statement from the fiction category judges, which included Nicole Magistro, owner of The Bookworm of Edwards in Edwards, Colorado, called A Little Life “that rare hybrid: disturbing yet humane, capacious yet intimate, and never less than brilliant.”

The Nonfiction prize was awarded to Between the World and Me: Notes on the First 150 Years in America (Spiegel & Grau) by The Atlantic senior writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Kirkus judges called Coates’ memoir, which is framed as a letter to his teenage son and bears witness to his own experiences as a black man in America, “a formidable literary achievement and a crucial, urgent, and nuanced contribution to a long-overdue national conversation.”

The Kirkus Prize for Young People’s Literature was awarded to Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan (Scholastic), a multilayered middle-grade novel set in turbulent times that explores music’s healing power, which the judges called “a masterwork by a virtuoso storyteller.”

Beyond Lolita to Raise Money for PEN America’s Writers’ Emergency Fund

In the coming months, five bookstores across the country will host Beyond Lolita: Literary Writers on Sex and Sexuality, a series of roundtable discussions with authors and editors, to raise money for PEN America’s Writers’ Emergency Fund, which supports professional writers in acute, emergency financial crisis.

The series of events was organized by Anna March, a feminist writer and activist and former co-chair of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts Development Committee, whose online column about books, Anna March’s Reading Mixtape, runs weekly at The Rumpus. March will moderate the sessions, which feature a list of panelists that include Audrey Niffenegger, Wendy C. Ortis, Laura Miller, Alexander Chee, and Cheryl Strayed.

Participating writers will reflect on their own work as well as the work of a diverse array of modern and contemporary writers, and topics of discussion will include the importance of writing diverse sexuality; sexual shame; teen sexuality; sexuality and aging; and aspects of LGBT culture.

The five roundtable discussions will take place at Women & Children First in Chicago, Illinois, on November 5; Skylight Books in Los Angeles, California, on November 19; Powell’s Bookstore: Downtown in Portland, Oregon, on January 11; BookCourt in Brooklyn, New York, on January 21; and Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 25.