LONDON: Amazon’s UK business paid just £11.9m in corporation tax last year, even though the online retail giant took £5.3bn in sales from British shoppers.
Accounts filed at Companies House this week show Amazon.co.uk made a profit of just £34.4m in the 12 months to 31 December and so paid corporation tax of £11.9m. British customers, however, account for nearly 10 per cent of the American giant’s global turnover, although until recently these sales did not go through its UK books.
Amazon announced last month that, since 1 May, it has started booking UK sales through a British subsidiary after years of funnelling its European sales through a subsidiary in Luxembourg where it enjoys low tax rates.
Its move comes as the Chancellor George Osborne pushes ahead with a “diverted-profits tax”, dubbed the “Google tax”, designed to discourage multinationals shifting profits out of the UK to cut their tax bills.
