And so it was with Andrew Cecil, Public Policy Director for Amazon Europe when he was summoned before the Public Accounts Committee in Westminster to explain why his company pays next to no corporation tax in the UK.
His brief from his Amazonian masters was quite clear: maintain the line that the UK is simply one element of a European wide business based in Luxembourg. But his preparation clearly did not include identifying the ‘elephant traps’ which the committee, chaired by the formidable Margaret Hodge, may have sought to lure him into. Cecil clambered out of one and immediately fell into another in quite simply the most embarrassing, shambling performance I have ever seen in committee.
Business leaders often come ill-prepared to select committees and the assumption is that private industry only engages with Parliamentary scrutiny begrudgingly. It is as if the mere act of questioning their actions affords them a sense of superiority by dint of their role as “wealth creators” over these grubby public servants. The transparency of that business operation and its responsibility to pay its due to its ‘host’ nation were the points under examination here. How annoying then, for these pesky democratic representatives to be asking such damn impertinent questions.
In fact, the questions which were, on the face of it, the most straightforward seemed to the hardest for the hapless, bewildered Cecil to answer. Of the 9Bn Euro turnover in the European operations what was the sales volume for the UK? First, Cecil said he didn’t know then that it was not usual to disclose those confidential figures. He would have to check back. So who exactly was the holding company for Amazon Europe? No, didn’t know that. What, really? What’s your job title again? This incredible assertion was understandably followed by much spluttering and exclamations, “ridiculous...pathetic.”
Ms Hodge, was clearly losing her cool and when he asked to “check back” on the next six or seven questions she just flipped, “You come to us with absolutely no information…pretend ignorance…I don’t know what you take us for.” After that kind of lambasting, you don’t seek solace in strong drink: you find the closest bridge and throw yourself off.
What is so deeply dispiriting is that these tax arrangements similar to Google, Starbucks and most recently some UK water utilities were exposed by newspaper reports. The Government is always crowing about how it is cracking down on tax avoidance despite laying off thousands of tax inspectors. These are just weasel words: the truth is that officials inside Her Majesty’s Treasury know full well what level of tax these huge companies are paying yet there appears no urgency to seek to upset the status quo.
As if we needed reminding, the nation’s lower and middle classes are groaning under wage freezes, wholesale slashing of public services and support benefits. To see millionaires and multi-nationals blithely refuse to face the same rule book and neither are they compelled to do so, is a rank injustice.
Successive Governments in the UK and many other countries have allowed the creation of an effective “accountocracy” where the creation of favourable jurisdictions mean multinationals can rely on the benefits of a nation’s infrastructure and skills of its workforce and then suck up all the profits for its owners.
Besides calling the more “credible” senior executives from the tax haven of Luxembourg, the Public Accounts Committee must next call in the finance ministers and ask what they intend to do about it.
I fear the answer will be the familiar lament: all bluster and do bugger all.
No comments:
Post a Comment