George Osborne has launched a crackdown on tax avoidance by multinational technology firms such as Google and Amazon, by imposing a 25% levy on profits which are generated in Britain but “artificially shifted” abroad. Dubbed “the Google tax”, the new levy was announced in the chancellor’s autumn statement...Labour MP and tax campaigner Margaret Hodge welcomed the strike against Silicon Valley, but experts said the estimated £300m a year in extra revenues was just a fraction of the real profits multinationals are making in Britain. The rules for the Treasury’s “diverted profits tax” will be published in draft legislation on 10 December and introduced in April 2015. They are designed to hit companies that use artificial structures to minimise UK profits and therefore lower their UK tax bills.The rate is 5% higher than next year’s UK corporation tax rate of 20%, suggesting the chancellor hopes companies will choose to dismantle complex structures that divert profits to low-tax nations such as Luxembourg and Ireland, and choose to pay HM Revenue and Customs instead.