DUBLIN: One part of the move had been long in the works by Grifols, a big Spanish medical company. The other came as a politically fraught surprise.
When Grifols, a global leader in blood-plasma products, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new $100 million distribution center outside Dublin last month, the ceremony capped a long-planned project, one that would add 140 jobs to its small work force in Ireland.
was the other part of the festivities the same day that few people outside the company were expecting. Grifols, which has 14,000 employees — more than half of them in the United States — announced that it would move its corporate treasury from Barcelona to Dublin. From there, Grifols will manage all its global payments, including taxes.
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The timing of Grifols’s move raised eyebrows, coming only about a week after the Irish government announced a new business-friendly corporate tax category. Grifols’s treasury decision also came as European Union officials are taking a hard look at multinational companies’ tax dealings with Ireland and some other countries in the region.
Grifols insists that moving its treasury operations to Dublin is not a case of tax engineering, but is meant to take advantage of a skilled Irish work force, the country’s legal stability and its convenient geographic location between Continental Europe and the United States. It says the move will have no significant impact on the amount of taxes it will pay in the 30 countries where it does business.
But Grifols could emerge as an early explorer of Ireland’s newly announced tax category — a “knowledge box” that, if the Irish Parliament approves the plan, would grant a tax rate of 6.25 percent on revenue and royalties pegged to patents and other intellectual property.
