Zara owner ‘aggressively’ avoided a huge amount of tax, Green party alleges
Brussels — Inditex, the world’s biggest clothing retailer and owner of the Zara and Massimo Dutti brands, used "aggressive" techniques to sidestep at least €585m in taxes from 2011 to 2014, according to Green party legislators in the European Parliament. Without an overhaul of EU policy, "multinationals and their tax consultants, together with states which choose to engage in destructive tax competition, will continue to get around efforts to clamp down on profit-shifting and tax avoidance," the Greens/EFA group in the parliament said in a report released in Brussels on Thursday. The Spanish clothing giant rejected the content of the report, saying it was "based on mistaken premises that lead to erroneous conclusions". Inditex said it scrupulously complied with tax rules in all the markets in which it operated. Inditex is the latest target of the Green legislators, whose previous reports threw the spotlight on how furniture maker Ikea may have avoided paying at least €1bn in taxes t...
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