The New York Times has a thorough article today detailing how both individuals and companies are using the Netherlands as a haven for productive activity.
This is good news for all taxpayers. The rich directly benefit, since greedy politicians are unable to seize as much of their money. And the rest of us benefit, since this puts downward pressure on tax rates as governments try to keep the geese that lay the golden eggs from flying away.
[L]ast August, according to details disclosed in documents maintained by the Handelsregister, the trade registry of the Netherlands, Promogroup helped the three [Rolling Stones] performers set up a pair of private Dutch foundations that will allow them to transfer assets tax-free to heirs when they die. Other Dutch shelters that Promogroup has arranged for the three have already paid off handsomely; over the last 20 years, according to Dutch documents, the three musicians have paid just $7.2 million in taxes on earnings of $450 million that they have channeled through Amsterdam — a tax rate of about 1.5 percent, well below the British rate of 40 percent.
The rock powerhouse U2 has transferred lucrative assets to Amsterdam, as have other pop singers and well-known athletes.…
While old-school, offshore tax havens — the warm ones with tropical fish, off-the-shelf holding companies sporting post-office-box addresses, and scant regulation or transparency — still attract money, they are largely patronized, tax lawyers and entertainment bankers say, by hedge funds and private equity firms looking to protect lush trading profits from taxes. But for earnings derived from intellectual property such as royalties, the Netherlands has become a tax shelter of choice.
Many of the world’s multinational corporations, like Coca-Cola, Nike, Ikea, and Gucci, have set up holding companies here in recent years to take advantage of tax shelters nearly identical to the ones that the Rolling Stones and U2 use.
The Netherlands is home to almost 20,000 “mailbox companies,” Dutch shorthand for corporate shells set up by foreign companies and wealthy foreigners who use them to relieve taxes on royalties, dividends and interest payments.…
Globally, some 1,165 companies use Dutch tax shelters to reduce or eliminate taxes on royalties and patents.
Not surprsingly, international bureaucracies and left wing groups despise tax havens — precisely because tax competition makes it more difficult to increase the size of government. The story in the Times elaborates, including completely unsubstantiated accusations that low taxes somehow facilitate dirty money:
Some experts see a darker side to the emergence of the Netherlands as a sought-after tax shelter. In 2000, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, black-marked the country as one of the world’s top five industrialized tax havens for promoting “treaty shopping” for low-tax jurisdictions.
…In its report last fall, SOMO, the research group, said…that “tax haven features of the Netherlands also facilitate money laundering and attract companies with a dubious reputation.”
