Eric Schmidt defends Google’s £6 million payment in UK corporation tax

Eric Schmidt defends Google’s £6 million payment in UK corporation tax During the course of an interview which will be broadcast on The World at One on BBC Radio 4, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt defended his company's payment of only £6 million in UK corporation tax.

With Schmidt noting that Google has invested heavily in the UK and its services perk up the country's economy, the defense of Google's UK corporation tax amount has apparently come in response to the last-year denouncement, by a committee of MPs, of multinationals - including Google - that pay a rather small tax on their UK earnings.

Schmidt's defense of Google's UK corporation tax payment comes in the wake of the fact that Chancellor George Osborne - as well as leaders in France and Germany - have called for international action to deal with the so-called "profit shifting" by multinational firms to avoid taxes.

Schmidt said that Google's practice with regard to taxes is primarily a reflection of the manner in which all bigwig multinational companies manage their taxes; and, to cite an example, added that the same is also true for UK companies which operate in the US.

Noting that Google empowers "literally billions of pounds of start-ups through our advertising network and so forth," Schmidt said: "I think the most important thing to say about our taxes is that we fully comply with the law and we'll obviously, should the law change, we'll comply with that as well."