UK Labour and opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn sent a cheeky message to US e-commerce giant Amazon with a birthday card the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, wishing him “many happy tax returns”.
My card to @Amazon on its 25th birthday.
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) July 5, 2019
"You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share."#Amazon #Amazon25 pic.twitter.com/8YewzxEb1K
The message was sent a year after a damning report from Channel 4’s FactCheck revealed that Amazon’s pre-tax profits had spiked from £24m to £72m from 2016 to 2017, but its tax contributions nearly halved from £7.4m to £4.6m and contributed just £1.7m after deferring payments.
On Twitter, many of Mr Corbyn's backers lauded his message and said that he was "the kind of Prime Minister" that would be "unafraid to confront and challenge businesses".
— Lisa GTTO #TransformativeLabour🌹🖐🏼 (@Libbibina) July 5, 2019
But some slammed Corbyn and his supporters, tweeting that Amazon didn't "owe anything" and that the company had "created 100,000 jobs and people are happy to use them".
— Alex Smith (@CobdenSmith) July 5, 2019
One Twittizen told the Labour leader that "the system itself" was broken that that corporations should not be allowed to pay "on a voluntary basis".
— Edwin Hayward🦄🗡️ (@uk_domain_names) July 5, 2019
Responding to the latter, one Remainer was certain to offer his thoughts on the UK's potential post-Brexit future.
— HTag #FBPE #revokeA50 (@HTagziria) July 5, 2019
The company, with a market value capitalisation of £761bn ($954.63bn), is the world’s wealthiest company, but has only paid less than 1 percent in taxes since 1998, or roughly £61.7m, in addition to donating the least proportional amount of income to charity. But the company has pocketed £6.86bn in revenues across the UK, in addition to expanding its distribution centres in the country. Tory PM contenders Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt have stated that they wanted to reduce corporate taxes in the UK, which currently stands at 19 percent.
Amazon also came under fire in April after a report revealed that workers were being supervised using artificial intelligence and were fired for missing production targets, as well as being denied bathroom breaks, sparking outrage from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), who slammed the US firm for using a "ruthless business model to destroy jobs for profit" and firing workers "without any human involvement".
