Between 2012 and 2016, the equipment manufacturers Eaton Corporation and Johnson Controls International, and the medical devices maker Medtronic, each changed the domicile of their New-York listed parent from the US to Ireland. They acquired Irish-resident companies that became home to their principal executive offices and remain so to this day, even though their CEOs all report living in the US. At the time, the headline corporation tax rate in the US was 35 per cent, compared to 12.5 per cent in Ireland. Those so-called tax inversions largely (but not fully) ended soon afterwards, when the Obama administration finally closed…

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