Starbucks’ UK arms last year paid their US owner 15 times more than the British taxman.
Its seven businesses here coughed up just £22.5million corporation tax compared to the £353million dividend it handed its parent company.
The windfall for the Starbucks Corporation was up from £47million in 2017 after tax reforms introduced by Donald Trump to encourage US multi-nationals to repatriate profits.
Margaret Hodge, ex-chairwoman of the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee, said: “When ordinary families are struggling, it sticks in the gullet that people like Starbucks won’t pay their fair share.
“It operates an opaque financial structure which has no other purpose than to avoid tax.”
The Starbucks Corporation has a stock market value of nearly £80billion.
Newly published accounts for Starbucks EMEA Ltd, which collects royalties from franchisees in various countries, show it paid the equivalent of £15million UK corporation tax last year on profits of £200million – a theoretical rate of just 7.5%. The standard rate is 19%.
However, the profit is before deducting a big dividend that came from its Dutch arm, where it has already been taxed.
This reduced the profit on which it was liable to pay corporation tax to £84million - a tax rate of 18%. Together with five other related companies, they paid a combined £18.6m in tax, at a rate of 23.7%.
George Turner of the Taxwatch consumer group slammed “secrecy” around the Dutch dividends.
He said: “The firm says these have been subject to tax overseas but how much and where is far from clear. It is possible the large profits declared in the UK have not been subject to much tax at all. The company have provided few details of payments outside the UK.”
Martin Brok, president of Starbucks Europe, Middle East and Africa, said business had been “challenging”.
