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Does it hurt the UK economy when the United States buy all our good companies?
There is also the egregious example of the takeover of one of the UK's few note worthy growth tech companies Arm Holdings - see link below. It absorbed almost £100 million in UK tax payer funded RD tax credits, only for the opportunity to pay this back via taxes on future profits to be snatched away by the opportunistic Softbank 2016 takeover, with Arm having since become a constituent of the NYSE for the benefit of its Japanese owner. Don't know about anyone else on this forum, but wouldn't it have been nice to have been able to by a share of what once was a British company occupying the same tech environment as Nvidia?
Softbank didn't buy it cheaply and Arm's still a British company that pays tax here, it's just that its primary listing is in New York rather than London. This actually is not so bad as you don't have to pay stamp duty. These days it's trivially cheap and easy to buy shares in the US via e.g., the likes of T212.
Corporation tax avoidance doesn't require foreign ownership. Just set up a company in a tax haven to buy goods and services from in order to reduce UK profits. I'm sure there are lots of other clever ways to avoid tax if so inclined. Vodafone, GSK, BT and JD Sports have all been implicated in such behaviour in the past.
