While most progressive activists and politically obsessed people were dissecting the elections endlessly yesterday (me, I made chicken and audouille gumbo), some pretty damn interesting stuff dropped courtesy of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Bottom line: we're being robbed every day and the price tag is huge.
The upshot:
Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny European duchy, leaked documents show.
These companies appear to have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes, according to a review of nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a team of more than 80 journalists from 26 countries.
Big companies can book big tax savings by creating complicated accounting and legal structures that move profits to low-tax Luxembourg from higher-tax countries where they’re headquartered or do lots of business. In some instances, the leaked records indicate, companies have enjoyed effective tax rates of less than 1 percent on the profits they’ve shuffled into Luxembourg.
And:
The leaked documents reviewed by ICIJ involve deals negotiated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s largest accounting firms, on behalf of hundreds of corporate clients. To qualify the companies for tax relief, the records show, PwC tax advisers helped come up with financial strategies that feature loans among sister companies and other moves designed to shift profits from one part of a corporation to another to reduce or eliminate taxable income.
The records show, for example, that Memphis-based FedEx Corp. set up two Luxembourg affiliates to shuffle earnings from its Mexican, French and Brazilian operations to FedEx affiliates in Hong Kong. Profits moved from Mexico to Luxembourg largely as tax-free dividends. Luxembourg agreed to tax only one quarter of 1 percent of FedEx’s non-dividend income flowing through this arrangement – leaving the remaining 99.75 percent tax-free.
“A Luxembourg structure is a way of stripping income from whatever country it comes from,’’ said Stephen E. Shay, a professor of international taxation at Harvard Law School and a former tax official in the U.S. Treasury Department. The Grand Duchy, he said, “combines enormous flexibility to set up tax reduction schemes, along with binding tax rulings that are unique. It’s like a magical fairyland.”
Shay, by the way, was the former Treasury Department official who argued, as I
wrote here, that corporate tax inversions could be halted by executive action.
A couple of examples:
The Pepsi Bottling Group Inc., a New York-based unit of PepsiCo, used subsidiaries in Luxembourg to arrange a series of loans among sister companies that allowed the bottler to reduce its tax rate on its $1.4 billion purchase of a controlling interest in JSC Lebedyansky, Russia’s largest juice maker. At least $750 million of the money involved in the Russian deal traveled through a Luxembourg subsidiary named Tanglewood, before landing in a Pepsi subsidiary in Bermuda. Luxembourg acted as a tax-reducing conduit as the profits moved from Russia to Bermuda.
Coach fashion label.Coach Inc. Photo: Ken Wolter / Shutterstock.comNew York-based Coach Inc. set up two Luxembourg entities to move €250 million in Hong Kong earnings in 2011, an amount it expected to approach €1 billion by 2013. One Luxembourg entity acted as an internal corporate bank, allowing much of the luxury goods maker’s Asian operating earnings to glide through a series of foreign entities in the form of interest payments on money the company loaned itself. Filings in Luxembourg showed that in 2012, the company paid €250,000 in taxes on €36.7 million in earnings channeled into Luxembourg – a rate of well under 1 percent.
And:
As in many tax havens, a Luxembourg office can be just a mailbox. Office buildings throughout the city are filled with brand-name corporate nameplates and little else. Some have offices and no visible employees. One building at 5 Rue Guillaume Kroll is home to more than 1,600 companies; another at 2 Avenue Charles de Gaulle houses roughly 1,450; and a building at 46A Avenue J.F. Kennedy is home to at least 1,300, according to an ICIJ analysis of Luxembourg’s corporate registry.
These companies can represent big bucks. From the U.S. alone, direct investment into Luxembourg in 2013 was $416 billion, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Of that, the vast majority, $343 billion, was in the form of holding companies, which are vehicles to hold securities and financial assets rather than to create local jobs. In fact, Luxembourg represents a tiny fraction of 1 percent – 0.13 percent in 2010 – of all overseas jobs with American companies, indicating it is a place that houses money more than it provides employment.
In 2011 Luxembourg passed new rules requiring that Luxembourg-based companies that serve as internal banks for larger corporate structures station a majority of their managers and board members in the Grand Duchy. It’s unclear how these rules are enforced and the Ministry of Finance did not respond to ICIJ’s questions about mailbox companies in Luxembourg.
The whole piece is worth reading. Really great journalistic work.
Sure, CEOs care about trade deals, cutting taxes, destroying unions and trashing regulations. But, from election to election, the way in which they can rob the Treasury and hide money just continues unabated, irrelevant to who is elected.