How’s that for taking control? On Tuesday the union that Britain has just voted to leave delivered its biggest and most important tax ruling of the lot. After two years of investigations, the European commission ruled that Apple had enjoyed special favours on its taxes from Ireland. Very lucrative favours, worth around €13bn (£11bn) in unpaid tax to the Irish government.

The case goes to the heart of much that is wrong with modern politics and business – of a system in which ministers help tax-dodgers and rent-seekers to rake in billions, while community businesses go to the wall and hard-pressed families see pay packets shrink and their public services cut. It also offers the voters of Brexit Britain a grim warning of the ever more dysfunctional capitalism being urged on their government by the free-market fundamentalists around the cabinet table and the lobbyists for investment banks and big business.

The big underlying question here goes far deeper than tax. It is this: how much is enough? How much should the top executives and big shareholders of Apple, or any other major company, get back – and how much do they owe their workers, the societies that protect their property rights, provide their infrastructure and workforces, and grant their legal liabilities? The story of the world’s most famous consumer electronics firm confirms how much the pendulum needs to be swung back towards the rest of us.

As companies go, you don’t get richer than Apple. Analysts calculate that the firm is sitting on $216bn (£165bn) – getting on for double the total international reserves of the entire US government (worth $121bn, at the last count). This is not money just about to be invested in excellent new products, ploughed into improving conditions and training for workers, or donated to good causes. This is a straight-up hoard, a rainy-day fund for the super-rich.

Apple has amassed such purposeless riches in large part by exploiting the opportunities and loopholes offered by contemporary globalisation. It has outsourced production to China and it has enjoyed decades of tax reductions from Ireland. All profits from all sales made in Europe were booked in Ireland. Almost all the profits allocated to Apple Sales International, in Cork, were shifted to a head office within the firm. This “head office”, remarked the commission, “was not based in any country and did not have any employees or own premises. Its activities consisted solely of occasional board meetings.” The head office existed only on paper, and the profits allocated to it went untaxed – a version of globalisation taken to its deformed, absurd limit. If Samuel Beckett had dabbled in accounting, this is the kind of elaborate joke he might have dreamt up.

Perhaps even he would have stopped short of scripting Dublin’s response , which was to angrily reject the €13bn on offer – and to begin a costly legal appeal. The unpaid taxes would pay for all public spending on the Irish health service for a year – and then some. But for decades the Irish state’s business model has been based on super-low tax rates for multinationals such as Facebook, in the hope of getting some coppers off their cash piles and a few jobs. When Apple said on Tuesday that next to no research work was carried out in its European headquarters of Cork, it was both preparing for a legal appeal and giving the game away about the quality of jobs it has actually created in Ireland.

It is no good the Obama administration accusing Europe’s competition enforcer, Margrethe Vestager, of being anti-American: she has recently dished out punishment to Italy’s Fiat and Russia’s Gazprom. Apple once boasted that its machines were “made in America”, but it has now shifted manufacturing jobs to China, even though research shows that it would still make a healthy profit keeping its factories in the US.

The lessons here for Brexit Britain are unignorable. For a long time, the City of London has functioned as a tax haven, the no-questions-asked capital of the rich world. As she maps out the UK’s future outside the EU at Chequers on Wednesday, Theresa May is under ever more pressure to go further down that route – to turn all of Britain into some light-touch special enterprise zone, with favours for industries making extravagant promises. The lesson of Apple in Ireland is that such promises are never as good as they seem. The foreign direct investment turns out to be indirect enrichment of a few, even while the host country’s economy gets ever sicklier.