Suddenly used cars are hot property

Companies should willingly pay tax wherever they generate profits — this column has long argued — because it’s fair they should contribute to the cost of the public services on which all business ultimately relies, and because the reputation of capitalism as a whole is tainted when corporate tax bills are reduced to absurdly low levels by the use of offshore domiciles and spurious royalty payments that most governments lack the willpower to challenge. So I welcome at least one half of the G7 finance ministers’ agreement last weekend on a new global corporate tax regime.

The half I’m ready to praise is the proposal that all countries should have the right to tax some of the locally generated profits of the world’s largest multinationals. That would begin to address shameless tax–minimising practices deployed in the UK over the past decade by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Starbucks.

The half I’m unpersuaded by is a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15 per cent.