Google Pays £6M Tax On £4 Billion 'Profit,' Sparking Fair Pay Debate

Google [NASDAQ: GOOG) will pay the UK government £6 million ($9.3 million) in tax on last year's revenues of £3.95 billion ($6.1 billion), it was reported Wednesday, re-igniting the debate over lax British tax laws.

According to ZDnet, the search giant's corporate tax bill amounts to £1,519 paid for every million pounds in turnover, a rate of just 0.15 percent.

Corporation tax, paid on profits, is normally 23 percent.

"We comply with all the tax rules in the UK," a Google spokesperson told ZDNet.

"We make a big contribution to the UK economy by employing over a thousand people, helping hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow online and investing millions supporting new tech businesses in East London."

Last year Google paid £935,000 on £2.39 billion in revenue, according to the Telegraph, while in the six years to 2010 the company paid a total of £8 million.

Google has located its European headquarters in Ireland, where corporate taxes are among the EU's lowest at 12.5 percent.

The company also operates another headquarters in Bermuda which "charges" its Irish office billions of euros in huge administrative fees for the right to operate - thus shrinking profits of €5.5 billion in 2009 for its European operations to a mere €45 million euros in taxable profit.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in 2011, Google chairman and founder Eric Schmidt said: "We could pay more [tax], but it would be very hard to say to our shareholders 'we feel very sorry for these British people, so we're going to pay millions of dollars in extra taxes that we're not required to do."

"There are probably laws against that."