the richest country in Europe and a tax haven where multinationals, millionaires and gangsters of all kinds hide their money

Luxembourg, founding country of the European Union, geographic and demographic dwarf of only 600,000 inhabitants, the richest country in Europe if per capita income is taken into account, it is officially for the IMF a tax haven. With 547 times fewer inhabitants than the United States, Luxembourg receives practically the same amount of foreign direct investment, much more than its neighbor Germany, which exceeds 80 million inhabitants. Because? Because the money does not go to Luxembourg towards the real economy but to escape, through its tax sinks, the inspections of public finances of dozens of countries in the world, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. ‘Europe.

French newspaper ‘The world’ published this Monday a special titled ‘OpenLux’, which opens the economic structure of the country on the channel to show that far from what its authorities say, Luxembourg is still a tax haven towards which they are heading to hide their fortune from multinationals who want to avoid paying taxes to gangsters, criminals and celebrities, sports and various celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Shakira or Tiger Woods.

Luxembourg allows you to create opaque companies that in reality they are nothing more than a postal code without activity where multinationals and great fortunes hide their assets. With the help of other newspapers, like the Belgian ‘The evening’ or german ‘South German newspaper’, the survey ensures that with “nearly four million documents relating to Luxembourg companies, we can lift the veil on a country which has one company for 4.3 inhabitants and in almost half of the cases, it is impossible to find the real owners ”.

In 2019, the Luxembourg government published the “RBE” or “Register of Ultimate Beneficiaries” which should serve to lift this veil of opacity. He was obliged to do so by a European directive approved in 2018. According to “Le Soir”, this file contained 140,164 companies as of December 31, 2020. The liberal executive Xavier Bettel was forced to publish this recording as a way to get rid of criticism from its European neighbors.

“Non-residents”

These data, which are public, allow newspapers, after more than a year of work, to identify “high-level sportsmen, artists, millionaires, relatives of men and women devoted to politics and even people. suspected of criminal activity ”.

The data processed by these logs show that nine out of ten companies registered in Luxembourg are controlled by non-residents and that one in three companies is in fact a subsidiary of a larger holding company set up only as a custodian to avoid tax in other countries and that it was only between 2018 and 2019 that the Luxembourg received 6,500 million euros which went directly to shell companies.

These “shell companies” – Le Monde tells us – “without offices or employees were created by millionaires, multinationals, athletes, artists, high-level political leaders and even royal families”. All with the aim of evade taxes or hide their farms national money illegally earned.

‘Le Soir’ asserts that the documentation handled makes it possible to ensure without any doubt that “dubious funds, suspected of coming from criminal activities or belonging directly to persecuted criminals following judicial inquiries, they found themselves in hiding in Luxembourg ”. And he assures us that among these millions there are goods of the Italian Ndrangheta or the Russian mafias.

The newspapers responsible for the investigation assure that the Luxembourg government is in any case violating the European directive which forced it to create the register of companies because it does not allow the identification of the beneficial owners of at least half of the companies registered in the country, about 70,000.

The Luxembourg government reacted yesterday by declaring that it “fully respects all European and international regulations in terms of taxation and transparency and applies all European and international measures in terms of information exchange to fight against abuse and tax fraud “.

From Brussels, the European Commission said on Monday: “These investigations are of course important pieces of information that push to make changes and expose the cracks that the system may have ”. Former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, was Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Luxembourg for more than a decade.

PB