Today's Sunday Times reports:
"Google, the internet giant whose informal corporate motto is "don't be evil", did not pay any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenues in Britain last year. The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary."
On the surface it's a fair story, at a time when bonuses, taxes and any perceived financial inequality along 'us and them' lines is regarded as fair game for mob conjecture. But given Google is far from alone in this kind of accounting practice, and a more beneficial story for the common good may have examined more closely why companies are avoiding siting their headquarters in the UK, it's logical to wonder what effect Sunday Times' proprietor Rupert Murdoch's beef with Google had not only on the placement but the writing of this story.
The suspicion this is personal rather than professional is perhaps supported not only by the cheap dig at Google's motto but by the short-sighted risk taken here. Most notably the risk of accusations of hypocrisy.
After all, Murdoch is no stranger to playing the game when it comes to the benefits and advantages of doing business on contrasting sides of national borders. Murdoch of course became a US citizen in order to get around media ownership laws in that country. And a better example may well be his own companies' approach to corporation tax.
For example, in 2002, The Observer reported on the use of tax havens:
The most notorious instance remains that of Rupert Murdoch. Last year the Guardian trawled 101 of the old brute's subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Virgin Islands and the Dutch Antilles. The reporters worked out that if Newscorp Investments paid corporation tax at the current rate of 30 per cent - the lowest ever, by the way - it would have given the Revenue £350m over 11 years, enough to build seven new hospitals, 50 secondary schools or 300 primary schools. As it was, it paid virtually nothing.
Google may counter that Ireland is a lot closer to its other European operations than Dutch Antilles is to Wapping or the street corner newsagents of Britain. It may also argue that it's done nothing wrong, or certainly nothing other comanies haven't been doing for years. It may even choose to tweak the Google rank of the above Observer piece to support that assertion.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of working the tax system the more interesting media story here isn't what is written on the page, but why.
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