[Tyrannosaurs]

The fact that on one individual sale the damage is minimal is pretty irrelevant - you don't get to pick and choose what you pay tax on.

Google in the UK had sales of £2.5bn. It has a group wide profit margin of 33% so let's assume profits of £800m and yet paid £3.4m in corporation tax (as opposed to the £220m you'd expect at standard corporation tax rates).

As someone who does pay tax at the full rate in the UK, I'd quite like it if they did too.

[jsnell]

Yes, it's immoral and in an ideal world would not be legal. But the decision to sell the Nexus 4 from Ireland clearly has nothing to do with dodging taxes, so it's ridiculous to use the Nexus 4 as an example of this kind of operation. The fact of the matter is that for a Nexus 4 sold to the UK there's about 40GBP of VAT being paid to the UK, and about 0EUR of actual profit for Ireland to tax (or for the Bahamas, or whatever the domicile of the appropriate sleazy holding company is).

[Tyrannosaurs]

No, they're selling it there because that's where they're set up. Just because you have a product you don't expect to directly make money on you don't go and set up a new operation to sell it - the fact you're not making money means that you're going to use whatever you've already got in place rather than incur new costs.

But the fact that this product isn't profitable doesn't excuse it. We're always told that Android drives the Google ecosystem which drives profits.

This phone in of itself may not be profitable but it drives other Google services which are and on which tax is avoided.

[andyjohnson0]

The more business they do wholly in the UK, the harder it becomes for them to make a case for not paying their taxes.