Yesterday, Tim Cook and other Apple managers appeared before a senatorial commission to explain why Apple uses Irish subsidiaries to avoid paying high US taxes. Same tactic is applied and Google, Yahoo, Starbucks or Amazon, but in the case of the first two there are also money transfers to offshore companies, so we are talking about elaborate schemes to avoid paying taxes, but nothing is illegal. Considering that tens of billions of dollars do not reach the governments' accounts and remain with the companies, the European Union proposed to investigate the phenomenon, France, Germany and Great Britain asking for the investigation.
Britain, France and Germany called for stricter rules to stop companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon aggressively avoiding taxes in austerity-bitten Europe, while acknowledging they had done nothing illegal. At a summit to discuss energy and tax policy, the leaders of the three largest EU countries took the opportunity at news conferences to lament the impact of corporate tax avoidance, following several cases involving US firms. Monday's US Senate report on Apple Inc followed reports that the British unit of Amazon paid just $3.7 million tax on 2012 sales of $6.5 billion, and similar revelations concerning the UK operations of Google and Starbucks.
Yesterday we told you that Apple paid 10 million dollars in taxes for 74 billion dollars collected, and now we learn that Amazon paid 3.7 billion dollars in taxes in Great Britain for 6.5 billion earned. In practice, the big companies avoid paying enormous amounts of money to the state budgets, and the governors want to stop the phenomenon that has seriously affected the whole of Europe and beyond. It is difficult to say how the companies will be forced to pay their taxes within the real limits, but it is clear that somewhere this phenomenon had to be stopped and if the lobby will not save them, then they will have to give up a good part of the money accumulated in future.
