That is the same for many big companies all over Europe.

These huge companies need to be broken up. They're more powerful than nations and have no geographical boundaries.

Analyst George Godber from Matterly Asset Management said the onus was on the authorities to change the rules, rather than on Amazon to pay more tax.

"We love to attack Amazon, but if they've operated within the laws and rules and regulations, then they've not done anything wrong. It is the laws and regulations that are at fault," he said, speaking on the BBC's Today programme.

Yes entirely the fault of governments, the problem is that they think that they can get a competitive advantage over other nations and attract a few jobs to them, by giving special tax benefits to foreigners who might invest here. It has been like that for thirty years or so. Only problem is that it harms small domestic businesses who cannot compete with multinationals that can use the system. It applies everywhere.


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If the foreign online companies want to [LIFTED] off, let them. The are plenty of British ones to take their place.

Amazon have not just 'operated within the laws and regulations', they've done everything they can to stretch and spin the interpretation of the laws and regulations to their advantage, in a way that if you or I did HMRC would come down on us like the proverbial ton of bricks. Amazon have got away with doing so simply and only because they can afford the kind of lawyers that you or I don't have access to and can lobby politicians who would ignore you or I despite being our representatives. All of which means that effectively they have more power than the electorate itself and more power than HMRC. This is not about law, it's about the application of political power for financial gain. Strangely enough, people look down on that in general.

People attack Amazon not because what they have done is illegal. They attack Amazon because what they have done (and continue to do ) is immoral. The fact a business analyst apparently hasn't even considered that aspect tells you exactly why the country got into the god-awful mess it is currently now in.

I guess the tax rates in Luxembourg are more attractive, so they choose to pay them there. Isn't that just an example of how free market competition works?

The point is that' free market' isn't open to everyone. It's not 'free' in any sense at all. People don't get to choose where they pay tax (unless they're one of the super-rich, but they're such a vanishingly small percentage of the population they can probably be ignored), they pay it in the country where their wages are earned. Yet corporations apparently are able to pay tax in countries other than where their profits are earned. I'd very much like to pay income tax in the Isle of Man, but I don't get the choice. My tax is taken out of my pay packet before I get it, and therefore before I'd have the chance to shift it to the Caymen Islands or some such. And even if I did come up with a scheme that allowed me to do that, you can bet

a) UKGov / HMRC would close whatever loophole I was using bloody sharpish
b) I'd be in need of a barrister.

People see this as inherently unfair because it's one rule for 'us' and another for 'them'.

As I say, it's all perfectly legal but it's not moral. You may respond that corporations have no requirement to act 'morally' but in fact, quite a lot of them make a big noise about how they do do so. A certain company whose corporate message is 'do no evil' for example, although they're far from the only one that wants to convince us they're a 'good guy'. Therefore they are also hypocrites.

You know how they say 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'? Well, it's not. Legality is. If someone has reached the point where they are saying 'well, it wasn't illegal' you know they've done something they should be ashamed of. And what's more, they know it too.

If I run a business in the UK and I happen to sell lots of goods in Germany, I'd pay no tax in Germany.

If I hired a guy in Germany to do the distribution, then I'd only pay tax in Germany on the distribution part - that guy's salary. If I went world-wide, I'd probably move my base of operations to wherever I paid the least tax. Isn't that exactly what they're doing?

Taxing a multinational company is not comparable to taxing a person who lives, works, eats an breaths in the UK. Those people that work for Amazon in the UK presumably do pay UK tax.

If the goods were manufactured by Amazon in the UK, then it would be a different story. However, they're not. The only goods Amazon make are in the far east, where presumably they pay local taxes according to local laws.

If the problem is that tax in Luxembourg is too low, then surely we should either lower our taxes to compete, or kick them out of the EU if they don't increase them?

^^^Which is why if you break up the companies, each can get taxed in their own country.

How would that be any different? The UK company would still be nothing more than a minimum profit distributor. They might even run at a loss, and pay no tax at all.

Or are you suggesting we should ban all imports, and only be allowed to buy UK manufactured goods?

Struggling to articulate but probably based on lack of knowledge.

How does Amazon work as a business? Not talking about Amazon-produced goods but stuff like Sony laptops, Samsung TVs, Canon cameras etc? They don't build it so they must buy it from somewhere and then flog it to us.

I imagine their head office uses their large buying power to get bulk discounts, and then they distribute the stuff to warehouses around the world.

I think it's fairly unlikely they run their own international distribution business. That would be a large unnecessary expense and we all know how keen they are to limit unnecessary expenses. Plus they would then also have to account for all the regional variations in the items in their product range.

I'd suggest it's more likely they make pricing agreements with large international manufacturers and then source the actual stock from that product's local distributor, same as every other company that sells that product in that country, just paying less to do so.