Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Sam Wilkin, Brussels News Editor, and today

we're going to talk about taxing tech giants. There's a lot of controversy in Europe over how

little tax companies such as Apple and Amazon pay, and now the European Commission has come up

with a plan to tackle it, but that plan has generated

plenty of controversy of its own. To take us through it, I'm very lucky to be joined by Todd Buell,

who's a reporter here in Brussels with our sister publication Law 360. Hello, Todd.

Hello, Sam. Todd, how little tax do the US tech giants pay in Europe? How much of a problem is it?

It's perceived by some people to be quite a problem. I don't know exactly how much taxed, precisely US companies pay, but I know that the European Commission claims that digital companies pay 9% tax, whereas normal legacy bricks and mortars companies pay around 21% tax. And you saw this

controversy pop up just recently in the UK. There was outcry because in the UK, Amazon paid

6% tax rather than the statutory 19% tax. Now, I want to be clear that

nobody's, at least to my knowledge, is saying that Amazon is breaking any laws here, and

companies claim or say that they pay the tax that they're legally obligated to. But a number of people have started to say in

recent years that the way laws are structured, the way that allow companies to move profits

around and just the difficulty in figuring out where these digital companies actually make their money

means, in effect, that they don't pay enough tax.

And the European Commission now wants to do something about that.

Even though they're operating fully within the law as the law currently stands.

Yes, yes.

And it's the idea to change the law.

Exactly.

And I think we accidentally hit on one of the, one of the controversial points there

when I mentioned U.S. companies.

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