France and Germany have been criticised for proposing a "watered-down" version of an EU-wide digital tax that would spare the likes of Amazon and Apple.

Germany's finance minister Olaf Scholz and France's finance minister Bruno Le Maire on Tuesday suggested a 3pc levy on advertising sales in bid to salvage a proposed EU tax on big digital firms.

The proposal is a compromise on a larger digital tax plan that would have hit some of the world's largest tech companies by taking into account activities from data sales and online marketplaces.

The Franco-German solution will not cover these, which means companies focused on online advertising operations, such as Facebook and Google will be affected while Amazon and Apple will be excluded.

Smaller companies could also suffer. Zoe Feller, partner at law firm Bird & Bird, said: "For all these big companies, the amount of revenue it is likely to be costing them is nothing and they are going to pass the cost to the smaller companies."