Booking: VAT evasion in Italy is pampered by Holland
Booking, the global hotel reservations giant, is accused of having evaded 153 million VAT. But Holland… The italics of Giuseppe Liturri
When it comes to tax evasion in Italy, the dominant vulgate in the newspapers, artfully fed, always proposes the legend of the plumber who does not issue the receipt and collects the remuneration for his service in cash.
The solutions are consistent with this picaresque picture: suffocating obligations, millions of compliance letters and the abolition of cash. So much for the straw.
If, on the other hand, we wanted to take a look at the beam, we should instead follow the story that for years has seen the Genoese judiciary opposed, with the support of the Revenue Agency and the investigations of the Guardia di Finanza, and their colleagues in Rotterdam, regarding the accuses the global hotel booking giant Booking.com of having evaded 153 million VAT.
Reuters yesterday reported that last month a European investigation order (EIO) addressed to the Dutch judicial authority was launched from the Genoa Public Prosecutor's Office, aimed at receiving further data on bookings relating to Italian structures managed by natural persons not subject to VAT and , above all, to ask some questions to Olivier Bisserier and Marcela Martin, who held the position of CFO of the Booking group from 2013 to 2020.
The tragicomic aspect of the story is that this is not the first request sent from Genoa to Rotterdam. The first was sent in August 2018 and was rejected in May 2019. The second was sent in August 2019 and, according to Reuters sources, has not yet received a response. If they had written to the Guinea Bissau authorities, perhaps they would have answered earlier.
We understand the reluctance of the Dutch authorities and we can only blame the Public Prosecutor of Genoa: if the Netherlands makes " aggressive tax planning " by the companies resident there, one of its main tools of competitiveness, as it is possible even to imagine that Can the local authorities be a disgrace to a giant like Booking?
The EU works like this: Italy must urgently carry out all the reforms foreseen by the knowledge. The others… are all Marquis del Grillo . The Genoese investigators are naive in not remembering this.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/booking-evasione-fiscale/ on Wed, 09 Feb 2022 06:57:13 +0000.