Watching Boris Johnson all but beg Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos to pay more tax this week was a galling sight. Amazon is the perfect illustration of who benefitted from the COVID-19 pandemic: the company’s profit in the first three months of 2021 was a record $8.1bn – more than triple what it was in the same period last year.
But it’s not only US multinationals that have cashed in during the pandemic. This week Tax Justice UK published new research that identified UK-based companies whose profits have soared over the past 18 months.
The research found that the online retailer ASOS, the outsourcing company Serco and the mining giant Rio Tinto are among six UK-based companies across online retail, finance, outsourcing, real estate, mining and pharmaceuticals who made £16bn in excess global profits during the pandemic. Most of these companies increased their profits by more than 100% during the pandemic compared with previous years – in some cases significantly so. The profits of one company, the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, increased by 801%.
