During angry hearings into the behaviour of three top US companies last week, an exasperated Margaret Hodge, chair of the UK House of Commons public accounts committee, told representatives of Starbucks, Amazon and Google: “We’re not accusing you of being illegal. We are accusing you of being immoral.”
The topic of the hearings was an old one: companies’ use of cross-border royalty payments, transfer pricing and siting of regional headquarters to lower their corporation tax payments.
Ms Hodge’s outburst raised another old question: can politicians bully companies into doing something that the politicians think is right but which the law does not require?