Apple again avoids taxes in the UK

Apple corporate results for its UK subsidiaries show no corporation tax was paid by the company in the country again last year.

The company posted UK profits at £68 million in the year to the end of September and during the period it gave shares worth £43 million to employees, which were booked as a taxable expense.

The move allowed it to wipe out its corporation tax liability and enabled it to claim a tax credit of £3.8 million to carry forward to future years. The company is believed to have managed to avoid liability for UK tax by awarding employees stock options as part of their compensation.

This was an expense the company could legally deduct from its taxes, according to the Huffington Post.

According to accounts filed by one of Apple's two main UK divisions, Apple Retail UK Ltd, the company made a pre-tax profit of £16 million on sales of almost £1 billion in the year to 29 September, while another subsidiary, Apple (UK) Ltd, reported a profit of £43.8 million on sales of £93 million, accounts filed at Companies House show.  A third, Apple Europe, made a pre-tax profit of £8 million.

Meanwhile, Apple avoided paying corporation tax in the UK last year by handing out staff bonuses of over £40 million in shares, according to reports.

Apple is not the lone US company avoiding British taxes. Aaccording to reports, Starbucks paid only  £8.6 million in corporation tax in 14 years of trading in the UK and, but it had since agreed to pay £20 million after the public outcry.

Also Google reportedly paid just £7.3 million in corporation tax on £3 billion sales. According to tax experts the figure should have been at least £200million higher.

According to Apple it complied with the law and paid "an extraordinary amount" of tax and in an earlier statement it said, adding it did not use tax gimmicks.