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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Completely, I found out yesterday that oil and gas companies only pay a fraction of the corporation tax that normal companies pay in the UK! We have as a society very strange priorities or maybe the people who assume power are just completely self interested.

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And the Government was complaining about giving a lot of millions to the EU in prejudice of making their health care system worse than it was.

There's a really nice fictional drama miniseries from 2018 about the discovery of oil in Norway: "Lykkeland". I assume it's a very stylized version of what actually happened but highlights the conflicting interests a little bit.

Oil companies in the UK are subject to: Ring Fenced Corporation Tax Supplementary Charge Petroleum Revenue Tax.

They are much more heavily taxed than other companies.

There seem to be quite a lot of taxes on them eg

>This means that the marginal tax rate on PRT paying fields is now 81% (fields not paying PRT pay a rate of 62%) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_Revenue_Tax

It says in that link that it was effectively abolished in the 2016 bugdet...

The UK Petroleum Revenue Tax (PRT) was set to 0% on 1 January 2016, and even before that only applied to fields established prior to 1993.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/oil-gas-and-mining-petroleum-rev...

Yeah, we could have had a sovereign wealth fund - instead we let the corporations exploit our natural resources for free.

I guess the Empire finally colonised itself.

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