Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Goldman in Danish tax probe

Here's an interesting little story from the Copenagen Post. We hope they will forgive us for reproducing this in full:

"Tax authority Skat is preparing for a major legal showdown with Copenhagen-based multinational cleaning company ISS over 5.5 billion kroner in undeclared profits. According to Jyllands-Posten newspaper, Skat is taking ISS’s owners, EQT Partners and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, to the Eastern High Court. The agency claims the money was withdrawn just after the pair purchased ISS in 2005.

The trial is the first of its kind, but according to Skat’s Michael Dalvad Carlsen there will be many more over the coming years, as the agency’s new crackdown programme, Project Money Transfer, makes headway on its numerous cases.

In the present case, EQT and Goldman Sachs structured their ownership of ISS through a series of holding companies in Denmark and Luxembourg, while the funds themselves were sent to well-known tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Guernsey.

But while Skat’s legal team feels it has a good case against the cleaning giant, ISS believes it will win in the courts, particularly as it was cleared of wrongdoing in the case earlier this year by the National Tax Tribunal."


Well, well. Now there are some interesting things going on in Denmark, and despite our criticism of Scandinavian countries for helping legitimise tax havens through the OECD's TIEA scams, we believe that the Danes may be doing some good work. See the details by scrolling down our recent TIEA blog. Project Money Transfer appears to be a major initiative: the Danes are allocating 500 tax staff to it!

We will bring you the Danish tax haven list soon!

1 Comments:

Blogger Physiocrat said...

The initials ISS ring a bell. They were on the overalls of the people who cleaned Sussex County Hospital a few years ago when I had to go there to visit a relative.

The place was filthy. How many people has ISS been responsible for giving MRSA to? No doubt they keep carefully to the letter of their contract but this kind of service should not be marketized

4:54 am  

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