UK probes Amazon over suspected late payments to food suppliers
www.france24.com
Britain's grocery watchdog on Friday launched an investigation into whether online retail giant Amazon made late payments to food suppliers.
  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    2·
    10 hours ago

    For anyone who has somehow missed this bit of business knowledge, it’s extremely common practice to delay paying something for as long as legally possible, if not longer, to the point it’s expected that your debtors will do this, and that you’ll do the same to everyone else in return. It was set up so that small businesses got time to pay for things, but of course, it was immediately corrupted by large businesses to screw over the little guy as well.

    I worked for a company that used the pay late tactic, and did this often enough and long enough to one smaller creditor that the creditor managed to issue a winding-up order, which was - or so I gathered - a nuisance to have to sort out.

    The downsides are 1) you have to get creative with the “prove [company] cannot pay” clause that’s required, especially if they’re big and wallowing in cash, 2) it costs roughly £3000 that you’ll only get back if you’re successful and 3) If you involve your own legal representation, that might cost extra that you definitely won’t get back.

    For the first one, an incompetence argument might work. Or else that the fact they haven’t paid means that their assets, however large, cannot be made liquid enough to pay. For the second, that money comes back from the debtor if you win, so it costs them more money. For the third and for everything else, good luck with that.