What reasonable person would buy a company for millions of dollars that has made horrific losses, that is actually worth nothing, that has no future and that can only be wound up? Of course, no one would do that unless they went mad. But that is exactly what 44 millionaires in Germany did. With a single goal: to outsmart the tax authorities in order to get even richer. Now the millionaires and the operators of this tax avoidance model are in trouble with the Munich public prosecutor and the tax investigation department. The authorities are investigating allegations of tax evasion in particularly serious cases. If the suspicion can be confirmed, prison sentences could follow.
This example alone shows that many players from the financial industry and its environment and many wealthy people have learned nothing, nothing at all, from the cum-ex tax scandal. Business is still being done without hesitation and conscience, which is completely pointless in business terms, only to damage the tax authorities and to enrich oneself. But parts of politics have apparently also learned nothing from the cum-ex scandal, which cost the state several billion euros. As with Cum-Ex, it took the federal government many years to close a legal loophole that made the new tax avoidance model possible at all.
Cum-Ex was not the exception, Cum-Ex is the rule
At Cum-Ex, banks, stock market traders and fund operators have operated huge stock deals in order to be reimbursed several times by the tricky deceived tax authorities for a tax paid once on dividend income. This went on until 2012, before the federal government finally put an end to this hustle and bustle. According to the investigating authorities, the new model with the artificially generated losses was developed just when Cum-Ex no longer worked. From 2013 onwards, a finance agency that also offers its clients “tax optimization” is said to have been active here.
The new model looks like a copy of Cum-Ex. Losses from trading in certificates are claimed twice with the tax authorities, but the profit is only stated once. Tax firms and apparently also professors give themselves for certainly not petty fees to classify the new model as legal. Banks join in by granting the necessary loans for these transactions, which are used solely for tax tricks. And millionaires grab it by the dozen. Didn’t they all hear from Cum-Ex, from the rigorous crackdown on the part of the investigative authorities?
The investigation has yet to show whether the new model is tax fraud or whether it was legal, unlike Cum-Ex. But one thing is already clear: Cum-Ex was not the exception, Cum-Ex is the rule. Part of the financial industry is constantly striving to exempt the state and harm society. Because the quick and easily collected money beckons. The dark part of the financial sector, its willing helpers and those wealthy who view the treasury as enemies can only be dealt with with the strictest laws and strictest controls.
What a waste of your mind and money
The tax trickery with the certificates is likely to be just one of many questionable models that have been practiced since Cum-Ex. What a waste of your mind and money. Those people who come up with such models are not stupid. Today there are so many opportunities to sensibly invest the millions and billions of euros that are withheld from the tax authorities. In research, in renewable energies, in projects that generate nice profits. Everything for your own good and for the good of society. But from a sociopolitical point of view, the Raffkes prefer to shit the state. And with it yourself, because the state has to cope with ever greater challenges so that it can continue to live well in the future.
But no one should expect insight and great thinking instead of petty egoism here. The new federal government and the federal states should jointly create a kind of tax TÜV that searches all old and all new rules for every little gap. The alleged new Chancellor Olaf Scholz talked a lot about justice in the election campaign. The subject of taxes is one of them.