In February 2016, Bloomberg News noticed that Google (now Alphabet Inc.) was able to avoid payment of $2.4 Billion dollars on owed taxes by using some European subsidies.
Just as a reality check, if you had One Billion Dollars and had One Hundred Years in which to spend it, you would have to spend $27,397 each and every day to do this - we are talking a very large sum of money.
The French want in on some that money. From Bloomberg:
‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
French investigators avoided the Internet, stuck to word processors and renamed Google ‘Tulip’ to prevent leaks as they prepared a secret tax raid at the company’s Paris offices last week.
“We decided to never utter the word ‘Google,’ to give the firm another name” and “we worked on this case fully offline for nearly a year,” Eliane Houlette, the financial prosecutor, said in a Sunday interview on French radio Europe1.
French police and prosecutors swooped on Google’s Paris offices last Tuesday, intensifying a tax-fraud probe amid accusations across Europe that the Alphabet Inc. unit fails to pay its fair share. France has called on the company to pay back taxes of about 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion).
“We worked with computers, but pretty much only with word processing.” Total confidentiality was key “given the activities of the company,” Houlette said. “The name ‘Tulip’ came up because the mother ship was registered in the Netherlands.”
I love it - honest to God detective work. Well done France!!!
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