The Court of Cassation overturned a court decision which invalidated a tax search at LVMH in 2019, and referred the parties to the Paris Court of Appeal, according to a judgment published on Wednesday. The National Directorate of Tax Investigations (DNEF) had carried out a search of several sites of the French luxury giant, including the headquarters of LVMH, avenue Montaigne in Paris, in a case of potential tax fraud. The tax authorities wanted to examine the role of a Belgian company, LVMH Finance Belgique SA (LFB).
The Court of Appeal had invalidated this search in 2020 and ordered the return of the documents seized without the possibility for the DNEF to keep a copy. More than a million documents were seized, according to There Letter A. “The Court breaks and cancels (…) the order made on September 9, 2020, between the parties, by the first president of the Paris Court of Appeal” and “puts the case and the parties back in the state in which they were before this judgment and refers them to the jurisdiction of the first president of the Paris Court of Appeal otherwise composed ”, according to the judgment of the Court of Cassation of which AFP has taken note.
“Pure procedural questions”
The tax investigators were looking for, according to the decision, “proof of tax evasion by the LFB company with regard to corporation tax, turnover tax as well as purchase or sale offences. without invoices and omissions of accounting entries or inaccurate or fictitious accounting entries”.
In a statement sent to AFP, LVMH “takes note of the decision”, which, according to the group, “relates to questions of pure procedure”. The group recalls respecting “strictly the rules and laws in force in all the countries where it is established”. In 2022, LVMH broke new records with astronomical sales of nearly 80 billion euros and a net profit of 14 billion euros.