BRUSSEL: Is set to launch an investigation into Ikea on Monday, as the EU widens the net in its four year crackdown on aggressive corporate tax avoidance.
Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, will announce an official probe into the flat pack furniture retailer’s Dutch tax arrangements, which have allegedly helped Ikea avoid nearly €1bn in EU taxes from 2009 to 2014, according to a report published in February 2016 by the Greens in the European Parliament.
The dwedish retailer created two separate corporate groups within a web of companies in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, through which the group moved money and profits to take advantage of special tax schemes, the report said.
EU competition officials would need to conduct an investigation to determine if the Dutch deal broke the bloc’s rules before they could estiate any tax savings from the structure.
Since 2013, the European Commission has looked at more than a thousand tax deals between member states and multinational companies. In the five investigations concluded to date, officials have ordered four member states to recover billions of euros in total from nearly 40 companies including Apple, Starbucks, Fiat and Amazon.
Ms Vestager last month said most deals did not give “special benefits” but a few “hand out a preferred tax treatment to selected companies”.
“Our work isn’t over yet we will open investigations whenever there are indications that state aid has been granted,” she added.
The investigation into Ikea would be Ms Vestager’s most recent state aid probe into the structures that allow some multinational companies to cut their taxes in a way that domestic and smaller companies cannot, which the commission deems an illegal benefit, or so called state aid.
Information is limited as Ikea is not a public company and, like most multinational groups, it is formed of a large number of subsidiary companies in numerous jurisdictions.
