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Last month, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published leaked accounting documents detailing alleged tax-avoidance schemes involving 343 companies in Luxembourg while Juncker was prime minister. The documents were used by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Since then, the ICIJ has received additional documents used by three other accounting firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and KPMG.
The latest documents reveal a labyrinthine movement of money which “reorder the ownership of many subsidiaries and centralise them under Luxembourg companies that are all served by internal corporate finance companies, akin to a company’s own bank,” said the ICIJ.
“These internal lenders received interest from affiliated companies channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in profits through Luxembourg between 2009 and 2013 and paid little tax. In some years, the two parent companies’ Luxembourg subsidiaries enjoyed tax rates of less than 1%.”
Juncker told the French newspaper Liberation that he had been “weakened because the Lux Leaks suggests that I would have participated in schemes which infringe elementary rules of ethics and morality”.
Full article on European Voice (subscription required)