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International
The European Parliament on Thursday called for an investigation by the EU financial supervisory authorities into CumEx tax evasion, which was initially thought to be limited to Germany, but which would also have affected 10 other countries, including Belgium.
Discovered in 2012, the fraud is now estimated by a consortium of investigative journalists at a cost at least ten times higher than what was suspected. In addition to Germany, it also reportedly affected Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway and Norway. Swiss.
It involved banks that facilitated the purchase and resale of shares owned by foreign investors on the day of payment of the dividend. The speed with which these transactions were carried out and the lack of communication between the authorities made it difficult to identify the actual owners of the shares by the tax authorities.
This exposed them to fraudulent claims for tax refunds from foreigners who claimed to have paid a dividend tax, which they could recover with fictitious evidence of having paid tax elsewhere. Often, the tax authorities refunded a tax that was unpaid several times.
In total, the fraud would have "cost" 201 million euros to Belgium, and 55.2 billion on all eleven states, according to nineteen media reports collected on the subject by the German badociation Correctiv.
MEPs demanded that the EU's financial supervisors investigate defaults and dividend arbitrations. They claimed that the rules on the mandatory exchange of information make it possible to disclose dividend arbitrage schemes.
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