I have written before about the fortunes, (pun, pun,), of “Apple” and I did make reference here to the sheer magnitude of the numbers involved. The Irish Government is casting an eye occasionally to Apple’s profitable worth and the EU is positively transfixed by it.

News to date has seen the EU demanding Ireland milk that company for €13 billion to be placed in escrow, a sort of financial purgatory, until a ruling is made as to who gets the loot. The Irish though have chosen to challenge this legally and the whole sorry mess is unlikely to see a courtroom for a few years yet.

But in a recent development, the Irish National Treasury Management Agency published a notice on the E-Tenders website seeking an agency to handle the multi-billion euro escrow. Being a proud and loyal Irishman, always ready to do his duty, I immediately replied offering the use of my Credit Union account for the period but sadly I’ve not had anything back from them so far. I’ll leave it for a week or two and then go back and offer them a slightly reduced percentage handling fee and that’ll probably do the trick. Five per cent p.a. may have been a bit cheeky of me after all.

But it made me wonder whether Apple could actually deliver the goods? Does Tim Cook have the real dough to put in my account? Thirteen billion is a helluva a lot. It’s all very fine for the company to be trading in eye-watering big numbers but this €13 billion – €16 billion has to come out of profits already made and still in their bank.

So I was relieved to read recently that the aforementioned Apple is drowning in cash profits. “The tech giant added a cool $30 billion to its hoard at the end of 2016, bringing its cash pile to $246 billion and once again topping a list of the five non-financial U.S. companies with the most cash, according to Moody’s,” the Siliconbeat reports. Of that $246 billion, 94 percent is held overseas (up from 93 percent in 2015), meaning that around $231 billion is just lying there in some financial black hole and you’d have to think that even if they wrote me a cheque for €15 billion of it, they’d have loads left for themselves. I can’t say fairer than that.

But seriously lads, €246,000,000,000!!!! Words fail me.

AAAAAaaaaaaaagh …………