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I don't want to belabor the publishers pricing policies, because I think they've been discussed many times, and the gist of it is that for various reasons, the publishers have set price points for hardcover, trade paperback, and paperback books, and they don't want to cannibalize the paper book market by setting the ebook prices below that. Except for the hardcover bestseller market where the booksellers are routinely discounted, the publishers don't like to discount ebooks below the lowest list price of a paper book.
It's pretty rare these days, but before 2010, when the publishers gave up and started selling ebooks of everything they published, I saw a number of ebooks where the publisher of the hardcover had the ebook rights, and a different publisher had the paperback rights, so the ebook was priced at the hardcover price even though the paperback had been out for years. I think Little Egret's right, and most cases today where the ebook is more expensive than the paperback is when either because the paperback hasn't been released yet, or for some reason, the retailer is discounting the paperback, but can't discount the ebook because of the Big 5 ebook pricing contracts.
BTW, Amazon and Apple may be doing hard geoblocking, but at this time, Kobo is pretty lax. And even if Kobo doesn't have the Amazon UK deals on sale, they will price match them, although I don't know whether they'd price match for someone who is clearly from a different country.
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