After last month’s revelations of “548 fiscal agreements between multinational companies or wealthy families and the authorities of the Grand Duchy”, Le Soir reports that 35 new companies have been identfied in the LuxLeaks tax evasion scandal, including “Walt Disney, Bombardier, Telecom Italia, Koch Industries and Skype”.
The mechanisms are similar to the those revealed earlier: “spectacular fiscal rebates (95 per cent of income for Skype, which is only paying for the remaining 5 per cent) or extremely low tax rates (0.28 per cent for Walt Disney Luxembourg)”. Those mechanisms, called rulings, “were set up by the ‘Big Four’: Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and Ernst & Young”, explains the Belgian daily.
According to Le Soir, the EU should now “act for more transparency” —
As even bigger efforts are being asked to populations, the EU Commission would gain some of the political legitimacy it critically lacks. And its president, Jean-Claude Juncker, would prove he is a true European statesman — not just the former prime minister of Luxembourg.
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