Microsoft maintains the fiction that it has sold its most valuable copyrights and other intangible assets to a tiny factory in Puerto Rico, where, thanks to promising to hire a mere 85 workers, it pays effective zero tax; the company transfers almost all its profits to this factory to "license" its own crown jewels, making the company totally unprofitable on paper, and thus immune from taxation. Read the rest
London real estate has been a favorite place for oligarchs and thugs to safely park their ill-gotten money. This 9-minute documentary takes you on a tour of North London's Billionaires' Row of uninhabited mansions. The structures are decaying, but the owners don't care, because the real value are the lots themselves.
From Amusing Planet:
The entire neighbourhood is owned by the super-rich, ranging from Saudi princes to East European arms dealers to Indian business magnates. Yet, no one ever lives here for more than a few weeks each year. Most have been left to the staff who looks after the properties while the owners are away. Others have never been occupied. Several huge properties have fallen into ruins after lying vacant for more than 25 years. These once expensive homes are in a terribly bad shape with peeling paint, rotting carpets, water streaming down bedroom walls, collapsed ceilings, and ferns growing between broken floor tiles.
The person who made this video said in the YouTube description, "We rarely explore alone but this documentary was filmed single-handedly, with a sharp ear, eye, a suppression of urgent tension, and a constant readiness to run! Hope you find it interesting."
Google and the other big tech companies are some of the most lavish funders of climate denial "think tanks" and lobbying groups, something they've been at continuously for more than six years, without interruption. Read the rest
Multinationals are excellent players of the global financial tax system, using "profit shifting" (through which operating profits are remitted to phony sister companies in tax havens as "licensing fees" or "management fees") to make it look like wildly profitable companies are losing money, making them eligible for tax relief and rebates -- thus it is that companies can rake in billions and then receive millions more in corporate welfare. Read the rest
Jared Kushner borrowed money to put down tiny down-payments on properties, paid himself millions from the rents generated by those properties, then used aggressive depreciation markdowns to declare an operating loss every year, meaning that he paid no tax at all from at least 2012 to 2016, and very little tax in the three years proceeding it. Read the rest
The Paradise Papers continue to expose the economically useless activity that late-stage capitalism rewards with titanic sums of money: today, it's the story of Julien Lavallée, a botmaster ticket-scalper who has harvested the lion's share of concert tickets from all over the world, laundering them for millions through a secret "top seller" program that Stubhub offers to anyone who can move more than $50,000 worth of tickets per year. Read the rest
The EU has ruled that Apple has to pay taxes on the billions it laundered through Ireland by pretending that an empty room with no employees was the company's "head office," a move that has enraged the Business Roundtable, which has sent a letter calling on the EU to respect the "rule of law," whose five signatories have all presided over acts of shameless lawbreaking. Read the rest
