Re: I'm sure...
> Tim Worstall will tell them that these companies did no wrong
Technically, no they didn't do anything wrong.
Remember that (IIRC) well over a decade ago, a senior judge in an English tax case made that famous statement that no man is required to arrange his affairs so as to allow the revenue to put a larger shovel into his money. If the rules allow what they did, then it is not wrong of a company to take advantage of that.
Put another way, before you criticise anyone or any company for a tax avoidance scheme - just check that you aren't using one yourself. Got a pension ? Got an ISA ? If the answer to either of those is yes then you are almost certainly using a tax avoidance scheme.
Yes I agree that it's "not right" that (taking one example) Amazon can exploit the tax rules to the disadvantage of pretty well all other sellers of books and the like. But the target of any anger over that should be the people that made the rules that allow it, not those working to those rules.
As for any of them pulling out of Europe, not a chance. Microsoft won't because it would then be leaving a huge market (bigger than it's own home market) ripe for exploitation by all and sundry - and it would just destroy the advantage (shear scale of it's dominance on the desktop and server) it's spent decades building by fair means and foul. Google won't for pretty much the same reason.
They may huff and beat their chests a bit - but any threats would be empty.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
