Two Sugars And Some Tax Please

Starbucks paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in 14 years of trading in Britain and none at all for the past three years, despite sales of £1.2bn in the UK so you would expect Starbucks executive, Troy Alstead, who faced a grilling about the tax the company paid by MPs at the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee to be a bit coy.
Mr Alstead said Starbucks had only made a profit once in the 15 years it has been doing business in the UK, stating 'I assure you we are not making money' he told the committee.
When pressed on why if they losing so much money by being here, why they continue to open new premises the man from Starbucks answered that 'It's very unfortunate. We're not at all pleased about our financial performance here'.
So what can we deduct from this?
Either the people who run Starbucks are the worlds most incompetent businessmen, continuing to invest while losing money year on year or they are lying through their teeth.
A third option is that Starbucks is simply a charity organisation, more concerned with providing us Brits with somewhere warm to sit and a hot drink then making a profit.
I don't think they are a charity and i don't think they are incompetent so it only leaves them lying and avoiding paying tax so a stonkingly huge fine must be in the offing.
If Starbucks threaten to pull out the country, we can all wave them goodbye as there are plenty of other coffee shops where we can get served by a miserable faced student and who are not conning us out of tax revenue.
I just hope that enough people now go elsewhere for their lattes and capuchino's so they really do make a loss and don't have to pretend then they may just feck off anyway.