Amazon handed £1m UK tax credit as profits surge 60% to £204m

theguardian.com:

Amazon’s core UK division was handed a tax credit of just over £1m last year by HM Revenue and Customs despite the online retailer’s profits soaring by almost 60% to £204m.

The tax benefit was part of €1bn (£850m) in tax credits provided to Amazon by governments across Europe, up from €56m a year before, according to accounts filed for the US company’s Luxembourg-based division.

Amazon’s losses across Europe skyrocketed by 90% to €2.1bn before the tax benefit, despite sales rising by nearly 16% to €51bn.

At the annual shareholder meeting in May, Amazon defeated efforts to force the company to be more transparent about financial affairs.

Amazon UK Services, the group’s warehouse and logistics operation, which is thought to employ more than half its UK workforce of close to 75,000 people, grew revenues by just over a quarter to £6.09bn, according to accounts to be filed at Companies House.

However, it booked a rebate on “current tax” – or corporation tax – which is usually paid on profits and after benefiting from the government’s “super-deduction” scheme for businesses that invest in infrastructure, which was introduced by the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, last year.

The relief, which allows companies to offset 130% of investment spending on plants and machinery against profits for two years from April 2021, resulted in Amazon getting a rebate on its prior year tax payment of £18.3m in 2020, with nothing to pay in 2021.

Amazon said total UK revenues, including all activities from retail to cloud computing services, increased by 12.6% to £23.2bn last year, putting the business slightly ahead of Asda, the UK’s third-largest supermarket, in scale and more than twice the size of Marks & Spencer.

Paul Monaghan, the chief executive of