Green attack Inditex, owner of Zara, by fiscal practices – Daily Management

Controlled by the tycoon Spanish Amancio Ortega, the richest person in Europe, Inditex recorded 20,900 million euros in sales last year, in 7,100 stores in 93 countries. Other brands of Inditex are growing up, but Zara still represents two-thirds of the sales.

(Bloomberg) Inditex, the leading clothing retailer in the world and owner of the brands Zara and Massimo Dutti, was accused by the Green Party to use techniques "aggressive" to evade at least 585 million euros (US$ 624 million) in taxes between 2011 and 2014.

Without a policy reform of the European Union, "the multinational corporations and their tax advisors, along with the states that choose to engage in destructive tax competition, will continue dodging the efforts to reduce the transfer of profits and tax evasion," said the group Greens/EFA in the Parliament, according to a report published in Brussels on Thursday.

The giant Spanish clothing rejected the content of the report and noted that it was "based on assumptions wrong that lead to wrong conclusions". Inditex said that it strictly complies with the tax rules in all the markets in which it operates. Inditex is the main objective of the legislators of the Green Party, whose previous reports put the focus on the way in which the furniture manufacturer Ikea would have evaded taxes by at least 1,000 billion euros to the nations of the European Union over six years.

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Controlled by the tycoon Spanish Amancio Ortega, the richest person in Europe, Inditex recorded 20.900 million euros in sales last year, 7.100 stores in 93 countries. Other brands of Inditex are growing up, but Zara still represents two-thirds of the sales.

the report of The Green Party in the midst of an investigation of the EU on the legality of the tax treaties that international companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Starbucks Corp have signed with governments. In August, the European Commission gave Apple Inc. an invoice of up to 13,000 million euros more in interest in what he called an illegal agreement with Ireland.

Inditex has used aggressive techniques to evade corporate taxes between 2011 and 2014, mainly in the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland, according to the Green Party. The techniques used are "actually legal", but take "wonder if Inditex pays tax where real economic activity takes place", according to the report.

"The operations between the group’s companies are regularly audited by the tax authority," said Inditex in a statement sent Thursday by e-mail, in which he added to always act with "maximum tax liability".

The Greens have called for a mandatory reporting country-by-country "financial data" key, a base of corporate tax statements and a common minimum tax to the corporate income in the entire EU.