(Paragraph 8 in this story was corrected to accurately reflect the number of jobs Amazon is creating in France)
US online retail giant Amazon is planning to create some 600 jobs in Luxembourg this year, boosting its headcount in the country by 20%, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
“We have grown from fewer than 300 people when I arrived (in 2011) to more than 3,000 today,” Amazon Vice President for EU Retail, Jorrit Van der Meulen said in a statement.
Amazon was facing criticism in the past weeks after a report by the University of London said the company was using the giant’s European headquarters in Luxembourg merely as a jurisdiction to substantially lower its tax bill. The report was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Left party.
The creation of the new jobs on top of thousands of existing ones shows that the company has sizeable operations in the country, unlike letterbox companies which often only employ a handful of people so that they can profit from favourable taxes at a low cost.
The report came at around the same time that Amazon won a court case against the European Commission after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) annulled a ruling by the Commission that a favourable tax ruling by Luxembourg had amounted to illegal state aid.
In October 2017, the Commission found that LuxOpCo, a subsidiary of Amazon – which has its European headquarters in Luxembourg – had received illegal state aid between May 2006 and June 2014 as the result of a tax deal with Luxembourg in 2003, ordering the recovery of €250 million.
Amazon was among hundreds of companies featured in the 2014 Luxleaks journalistic investigation about tax rulings Luxembourg handed to companies.
In early May, Amazon also said it would create some 3,000 jobs in France this year – bringing the total to 14,500 – driven by the opening of a new warehouse near Metz. In Luxembourg, the positions are mainly for high-skilled workers, in software development, account management, data science, machine learning, cloud development and solutions architecture, the company said.
Amazon started 2020 as Luxembourg’s 10th-largest employer with almost 2,800 workers, according to government statistics agency Statec’s most recent count.
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