The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B
cumex-files.com
cumex-files.com
really awesome about correctiv is that they not just release their findings - they really make sure that something is going to be done about it. for example the government didn't do much about above mentioned case - they didn't even bother to inform the patients. so correctiv rented a shop in that town (Bottrop) where people could inform themselves about the matter.
if you want to support them: https://correctiv.org/ueber-uns/#unterstuetzen-sie-unabhaeng....
the one thing I find most concerning about these kind of revelations is that it seems that journalism is more and more responsible for work police should be doing.
[1]: https://correctiv.org/ruhr/alte-apotheke/2018/08/10/trotz-an...
I think this echoes a lot of sentiment, if perhaps without concrete evidence, across the world.
How can we solve this?
Edit-pedantry
So obviously people from the UK, Norway, Netherlands, and Spain should not get involved /facepalm
Having a queen and a ridiculously nationalist political parties has to be the most embarrassing parts of being British.
God (lol) divinely gives power to the queen (lol) through birthrite (lol) and we are her subjects (lol).
It is so deeply offensive that I am meant to he her slave, and its shocking how much idiots dont think it matters.
I think Boris Johnson does quite a splendid job in the British embarrassment department.
1) Become a career politician yourself. 2) Put yourself in the top 0.1% wealth bracket, and share your opinions with money.
The police are generally bound by procedural rules that prevent them from doing these kind of investigations, especially where much of the direct evidence (or in many cases, the actual crime itself) is based on entrapment.
However, once journalists have done the dirty work, the police can use their reporting to find evidence that would survive legal challenges to the means through which it was collected.
for instance:
- In the article you've linked, I'm sure there were better images of a conservative politician to choose from. Small thing, but not for professional journalists
- In the CumEx-article, what information do I gain, when they state that one of the perpetrator's lawyers is a famous face of the German pro-market party FDP - other than that it's good that they aren't part of the government? BTW this politician is known to be a lawyer for defendants in cases with a lot of press coverage. Is he guilty by association? Is thus his party, the people voting for them?
- Their focussing so much about the new right-wing populist party AfD
And what of course will always make the tinfoil hats spin:
- Being funded (among others) by George Soros
A latest example: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/16/washington-post-lo... "Washington Post told lobbyist: Quit working for Saudis or stop writing for us". Admittedly that's in the "opinion" section, but the line between the two is very thin.
Given this the only thing you can do is find reporting that does a reasonable job of finding the answers, is consistent with your own values, and doesn't have to issue too many retractions for obviously stupid things they got suckered/biased into printing.
The choice between "holding power to account" versus "supporting the existing power structure and its prejudices" is both a key partisan divider and the only reason for press to claim a public interest defence in the first place.
Alternatively, you can just read multiple news sources (ideally some from other countries as well) and compare them on their coverage of the same event. It's pretty enlightening to see what each source covers and what is their take on it.
I'm sure the key points will be hashed and rehashed until many of the type of article you want are all over the internet.
Journalists keep injecting themselves into their stories without being either interesting or contribute in any way (other than to show off their narrative and descriptive writing skills).
I hope it's just a short term trend or due to journalism budget cuts.
You sure about that math, cumex-files?
I have two takes on this: 1: The Danish tax authorities have been extremely careless in the administration of the rules. They didn't even check that the people owned the shares they claimed to own. Virtually all of it was approved by one employee with zero oversight. 2: Different international banks have either known what was happening, and willingly enabled it, or should have known. Money laundry rules oblige them to check when such giant sums flow in and out of such few accounts.
Of course the system was delayed.. by years... And there were fewer experienced employees available because the lay-off policy was to let people retire as normal, but just stop hiring.
When the system finally was released, the tax collection service was in dire straits. Layoffs had continued, experience was lost. Employees were doing the work of 3 people without really knowing how and having noone to ask for advice. To top it off, it was politically decided to decentralise the tax collection service and split the offices into many small units across the country. Causing even more people to quit.
This isn't the end though. The system was released all right, but it was quickly discovered that it was making illegal tax collections from citizens due to faulty property evaluation. Attempts were made to fix the system, but it was SCRAPPED AFTER TWO YEARS.
Now we are left with a broken tax collection agency which cannot perform its duties and lacks manpower to verify tax claims from companies knowingly exploiting the situation.
Then again, since it seems like most voters don't really give a damn, I guess it's politically expedient to just not care.
The entire idea was really not implemented well and now the tax agency needs like 4000 new people to replace the ones they didn’t want to lose. Lots of senior knowledge is gone and the entire agency is struggling doing its main tasks, resulting in hundreds of millions of missed taxes.
Yes. But people hates bureaucracy.
A common answer is'why do I need to present another document in the tax office?'
At least now Danish citizens have an answer. 'to avoid losing 1.7B'
bureaucracy is a remedy to a problem. It can be done right or wrong, but it's not bad by itself.
Like with metrication us Brits adopted it slowly so there were many years of seeing either usage. This wasn't confusing at all. :)
"miljoen" -> "miljard" -> "biljoen" -> "biljard" -> "triljoen"
^6 -> ^9 -> ^12 -> ^15 -> ^18
However, a lot of Afrikaans-speaking people use the de facto English convention. The newspapers usually get it right though, in contrast to this article.
i dont think that's true
The UK is the only place in Europe where "billion" means 10^9; in Eastern European languages, there simply isn't an equivalent word, and everywhere else it means 10^12.
Here is a handy list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_sca...
The numbers are just too big for it to make sense. And I would not be surprised to see some of it coming down to the lack of math skills (or what you call it?) amongst journalists. How can anyone arrive at a result like that and not look one more time at their calculation?
Embarrassing really.
With all the fuzz about Sanjay (the alleged perpetrator) why hasn’t the danish police issued an international arrest order for him? Regardless if he is sitting in Dubai.
And what seems to be a common theme is that some of what has been going on is very hard to prosecute. The first wave of tricks seems to have been basically legal if I recall correctly. I haven't read the new slew of articles about the EU dimension on this yet though.
Plus the recent the story that Sanjay was put in jail due to a rubber check. Doesn’t sound like a guy who just got away with 1 B euros.
"In Denmark, journalists and the authorities are also investigating the cum-ex trades. Tax payers have lost up to €2 billion * , that’s nearly €350 for every Danish man, woman and child."
That's correct - mathwise.
Overstated a 1000 times, which suggests they are mistaking the new US-style billion of 1000 million for the old form of a billion (i.e. a million million).
edit: Then I got curious about what size a 'town' is, which led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_hierarchy which gave me the word 'Ecumenopolis' for a planet-wide city.
The decimal separator in most european countries is the comma. $350,000 in Denmark equals to $350. If there is an error by a factor of x1000 I would assume that is a case of meaning lost in translation and not intentional. The use of a third decimal is uncommon and unfortunate in any case.
I just can not understand, how the government of my country could work this way. It really borders to actively supporting this scam.
In my opinion, not only the people that have done this (including many banks!), but also responsible persons in the government or ministries should take responsibilities.
But in Germany, if you are big enough or in government, you can do nearly everything without effects.
Banks already have looted the people of many countries in 2008/2009.
While I sadly agree, I would like to point out that this is true of many countries.
In the beginning of the article is a rough description of the trade in question:
> Cum-ex – this is the name German media have given to this scam. Internationally the different variants of these trades are known as dividend arbitrage.
> Cum-ex and its variant cum-cum were highly complex share deals with no economic purpose other than to receive tax ‘reimbursements’ from the state – but for tax that had never in fact been paid. This is how it went. The participants would lend each other shares of major corporations, creating the appearance for the tax authorities that there were two owners of the shares when in fact there was only one. The bank which settled the trades would then issue a ‘confirmation’ to the investor that tax on dividend payment had been paid to the tax office – when in fact it had not. With this confirmation in hand, the investors were then ‘reimbursed’ by the state. It’s a bit like parents claiming child benefit for two – or more – children when there is only one child in the family.
Late in the article we get a description of the origin of the trade:
> The money machine
> According to Frey, an equity trader at a US investment bank came across the trade accidentally. He had bought shares that were delivered four days later. This interval covered the dividend payment day of the company whose shares he had purchased. This profit is taxed in the domicile of the company (say, Germany). German shareholders can ask for this tax to be reimbursed because they have already paid corporation tax.
> The trader suddenly realised he had this tax payable in his book without actually owning the shares. The amount was £50 million. It was a very large trade.
> The trader wanted to get rid of these funds that were not his. He approached the seller of the shares who had also been reimbursed his tax. The bank’s legal department sought professional tax advice to find out how to return the money to the tax office. The answer came back: “You can keep it.”
> There is no law that prohibits a multiple tax payout, they said. And if something is not explicitly prohibited, it is legal, the tax advisors argued. The trader kept the money. And because the tax reimbursement happened automatically, the scheme could be repeated time and again.
> All you needed was enough funds to trade the shares for a few days around dividend payment date. Or you could even just borrow the shares.
Following "dividend arbitrage", there are a couple of other articles that talk about it, Bloomberg [1] and ProPublica [2], though it's hard to tell if they're talking about the same thing or an older version of the scheme. In Denmark, where there is the most evidence of reimbursement for unpaid taxes, it looks like the investigations date to 2015 [3].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-18/denmark-t...
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/denmark-is-big-victim-of-...
[3] https://www.thelocal.dk/20150925/danish-tax-authority-cleans...
(saved for later reading)
In my understanding of reality, it's "business as usual".
I've anguished over this for years and have learned to accept it, depending upon where you live; this comment might sound entirely absurd.
And I have no idea why you thought bringing this up was relevant.
Also: this is a drop in the ocean compared to EU-internal tax loop holes and tax havens such as Luxembourg.
Besides, they literally have a link to a page with detailed financial information, including every organization that gave them more than 1000 EUR to them.
Most of their funding in 2017 came from private parties not affiliated with any government. I can't find any numbers for 2018, which is a shame.