Another newsworthy item, it is timely as it was reported only today and perhaps really deserves a separate thread.

It seems Apple paid less than 2% tax on all of its huge profits outside the US. It paid $713m (£445m) in the last year on non-US pre-tax profits of $36.8bn (yup thats billion), a rate of 1.9%.

Yet another company to be identified as allegedly paying unsustainably low rates of tax, following similar allegations about Starbucks, Facebook and Google in recent weeks, using tax avoidance schemes that are deemed not to be illegal.

Once more spurious arguments such as that all of the companies pay considerable amounts of other taxes in the UK, such as National Insurance, and raise large sums of VAT are espoused by their defenders. It is not reported what portion of these monies are UK based revenues.

VAT is a surcharge on the purchase price of goods and services; the customer pays it, the company collects it and it passed on to the tax authorities.

At no point do the companies "pay" or generate this tax.

Would that a the majority of tax payers in this country could elect to pay that equivalent level of tax within PAYE - or indeed that our hard pressed economy can afford such exportation of huge volumes of revenue to other shores in a seemingly un-accountable fashion.