Saturday, May 10, 2014

Call to boycott Amazon for avoiding taxes...

Margaret Hodge, the chair of the public accounts committee, has called on shoppers to boycott Amazon after it was revealed that the online store paid just 0.1% tax last year.

Drawing on the indignation provoked earlier by Starbucks, Hodge advised shoppers to shun Amazon, noting that it paid just £4.2m (€5.1m, $7m) in tax in 2013, despite sales totalling £4.3bn.

Despite employing plenty of staff in its British operation, the Kindle manufacturer books its profits at its tax-exempt headquarters in Luxembourg.

Hodge told the Guardian "It is an outrage and Amazon should pay their fair share of tax. They are making money out of not paying taxes. I no longer use Amazon. We should shop elsewhere. What we demonstrated with Starbucks is the power of the consumer voice."

Large US technology companies have done a good job of grabbing the public's attention because of their egregious tax affairs - something which gets up the nose of European regulators and governments. In fact technology firms are neither more nor less rapacious when it comes to tax than any other large multi-national companies (MNCs). The common tax dodge of making large deductible payments does not require a company to be in a high-tech business: Starbucks buys coffee from a Swiss affiliate, for instance. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Don't buy gifts from tax-dodging Amazon, say UK MPs...
  2. Coffee chain Caffe Nero hasn't paid a penny in corporation tax despite...
  3. Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers...
  4. Robbery of the Century: tax evasion...
  5. 'Google is cheating British taxpayers out of millions...
  6. Are you paying Facebook's taxes? Again...

No comments:

Post a Comment