My view is that a lot of stuff that they do isn't actually legal, but HMRC does not challenge them enough to prove that. Directors should not be risking their company's reputation to dodge 24% corp tax, their job should be increase overall profits rather than fook with HMRC, at least that's how they should understand their job under penalty of long prison sentences.
If that's true, then it's tax evasion, and nobody, not the headline grabbing politicians or the newspapers themselves have said that Amazon, Starbucks etc. are guilty of tax evasion. If you have some evidence I suggest you tell somebody, because even if HMRC can't be arsed, the newspapers probably will.
Directors, as you've said, have no choice but to try their best to increase the profits of the company and if their accountants and lawyers (I assume they have many) advise that something is legal, then it would be negligent on their part not to follow that path.
Easy - offshore entities are the ones who get the money for actual sales, but costs are attributed to local entities, for example it appears (based on press that I've ready) that UK companies who buy ads in Google actually pay to Google Ireland, and Google UK is paying large "license fee" so it does not make much profits here. They do the same in France but the French have now taken correct view that since contracts are in French and actual activity takes place in France then such transactions should be deemed as if they happened in France.
So, for example, Porsche make a car in Germany and sell it to somebody in Britain. All the money is made in Britain, but 99% of the costs are incurred in Germany. In your scheme, Porsche UK have to pay CT on virtually the whole purchase price because that's "profit", even though Porsche International might be barely breaking even.
Clearly that's ludicrous. At the end of the day, local taxation is incompatible with the idea of international trade. And so far we've been talking about physical goods, what if it's software? I've bought software and paid for website accounts from US companies, and there's no way they're paying UK VAT or CT and it would be ridiculous to suggest they should.
Amazon and a few others online etailers forced the rest of industry to try the same approach after many years of Govt doing fook all about it.
Don't think so. The likes of Play had setup in Jersey when Amazon were still selling books. I doubt Amazon had even registered with them, it was the likes of HMV and Virgin they were trying to compete with. And Play weren't an established international organisation moving into the UK market, they were a company specifically setup with the sole aim of selling cheap into the UK using the low value VAT loophole to undercut the competition.
