Tax hells not heavens (part 1)

gexi (54)in #steemit • 7 years ago

This is the translation of that german text.

Short definition

It’s a place where you have to pay little to none taxes for your income or goods and that’s how the rich(companies and people) get richer or stay rich.
Through a liberal and transparent tax politic(how they call it there) these countries make it possible to avoid taxes in a legal and not so legal way.

Some of you might already heard of the Panama Papers/Lux Papers and so on here a list:
Now I am going to give you some insight in the paradise papers which have been published around 2 months ago.

Who?

The rich, it follows a list of well know(or now know through these papers*) people and companies:

people:

Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban
Die Queen, Königin Elisabeth II.
Lewis Hamilton
Bono
Shakira
Alfred Gusenbauer
Madonna
Justin Timberlake
Harvey Weinstein
Gerhard Schröder
Martha Stewart

*Family Engelhorn, Paul Gauselmann, Harald Leibrecht(FDP), Klaus Mangold, Dan Gertler, Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, a lot of canadian ex prime minister, the inner circle of Donald to Putin, some relatives of the turkish president, and many more who I wont name here!

companies:

Apple
Facebook
Microsoft
Ebay
Twitter
Uber
Yahoo
McDonalds
Nike Walmart
Glencore*
Sixt
Deutsche Post
Siemens
Allianz
Bayer
Deutsche Bank

Where?

Between Great Britain and Ireland is the Isle of Man(ruled by the Queen) located, the tax heaven in the paradise papers. Years ago it have been, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Malta, Bermudas, Panama or the Bahamas, now it is that island. In the capital live 30000 and 28000 companies, mainly letterbox companies, are placed there. The advantage there are no capital returns and estate tax, that only works with an own parliament and tax policy.

isle of man.jpg

How?

There are some methods for tax avoidance or fraud and I going to explain a few of them.

Trusts:

The Trust is a medieval construct, the crusader needed a reliable manager of his goods
in his absence. So they made a law, where the knight gave his property to this Manager(trustee) who is bond by the order, to return the property back after the returning of the knight. Thats how the crusader became the assignee(beneficiary) of this deal, but the trustee have been a close friend the whole time.

The problem here is, that the tax collector are unable to find out who is the founder, beneficiary or trustee of this trust.
In my opinion this is a more bold method than foundations... .
This shows, once again, the development of favoritism.

The CV BV Structure

In this case the gainings are not effected by any tax, and this is how it works:
In this example an american company like Apple, Uber or Pfizer are founding two companies in the Netherlands one called CV the other BV. BV leading the whole EU-business, a big amount of the gainings is tax free.
CV maintains the licence and trademarks for the concerns(group) products. Now they are paying an horrendous amount of money for these licences and so they reduce their gainings(thats good because less taxes)
The clue is that CV doesnt pay any taxes now because in the netherlandish law only the owner if the concern has to pay and since this one sits in the US no one follows this lead.
Thats how US companies have gainings around 500 billions in the Netherlands, taxfree.
To solve this problem the other EU-countries should apply more pressure on the Nehterlands, which they aren´t doing. The opposition is to weak to have any effect on that.
This will be prohibited within 2020.. .

Share Deal

By buying an building it´s normal to pay conveyance duty, but with a share deal you can avoid that.

If you dont buy the whole house, only a big part of it and give two dummies little parts(by giving them credits) you dont have to pay any taxes. Sounds rediculous, but thats hwo it works.

Paradise Papers:

The Paradise Papers are 13,4 Million leaked documents predominantly about the law firm APPLEBY and Estera. They got edited and published by mainly german reporters and media like ORF, NDR, WDR, SZ but also the New York Times, Le Monde, La Nación, BBC, The Guardian. A lot of them already work on the Panama-Papers.

APPLEBY ist eines der marktführenden Unternehmen für Offshore-Geschäfte, macht rund 100 Millionen US-Dollar Jahresumsatz, beschäftigt 470 Mitarbeiter und hat Büros in allen wichtigen Steueroasen.
Das Unternehmen wurde auf den Bermudas gegründet und steht im Mittelpunkt der Aufklärung.
Kurz vor den Veröffentlichungen, behauptete APPLEBY einem Cyberangriff zum Opfer gefallen zu sein und betonte stehts legale Offshore-Praktiken angewendet zu haben, was selbst nicht mit sorgfältiger Prüfung widerlegt werden konnte.

APPLEBY is one of the leading companies of the offshore-business and is focused in this leak.
It has around 100M US Dollar annual turnover, got 470 employees, firms in all important tax heavens and was founded on the Bermudas.
Before the leak went public they said that they were a vicitim of a cyberattak and pointed out their whole offshore business is legal and after carefull proof they couldnt find anything illegal.

This example will be about Curt Engelhorn, his daughters and Lewis Hamilton.

(Curt Engelhorn, left)

Curt Engelhorn might be the biggest taxcase in german history.
In the 80s he replaced the headquarter of his pharmacompany Böringer Mannheim onto the Barmudas. That’s how he could avoid taxes by selling his concern for 19billion Mark and the german tax office couldn’t do anything.
Also his daughters Elisabeth „Sissi“ and Carolin shouldn’t be missed out and so he gave his whole money to the trusts and felt good by doing that.
After a leak that they could be the beneficiaries of the trust and avoided like 440million€ they remanded in custody. But the more prominent the accused the more professional the defense.(Not proportionality)
So the sisters had to pay only 145M€ and a penalty, after that they escaped to Switzerland.
In the papers many more inconsistencies came up, like a Bellavista trust whose beneficiary the angel foundation is which again is connected to the Engelehorns. So there is clearly much more than those 440M of taxes they should have payed.

(Carolin)

(Elisabeth, right)

The Private Jetcenter, a company on the Isle of Man, is importing airplanes, because there are no import turnover taxes to pay, so the F1 Star Lewis Hamilton with 600M€ private assets boought his Jet(25M) through the APPLEBY company and so they have done it:
First they found 2 companies, the first one imports and the airplane and other companie(an airline) rents it.
So the private jet becomes a business aircraft and s the comapnie gets the tax(20% so 5M€) retourned... .
Now he charters his own jet and can use it privately, but everything is legal and after proofing Lewis hasn´t done anything illegal.
Thats how APPLEBY avoided around 250M€ of taxes and that´s money the EU desperately needs for enviroment- and civil protection.

(Lewis)