The French financial prosecutor's office carried out house searches on Tuesday at five banks in Paris and the business district of La Défense, which borders the capital to the west. According to the authority, they were carried out as part of preliminary investigations initiated in December 2021 on allegations of money laundering and serious tax fraud in connection with the so-called "-" fraud.
Marcus Jung
Editor in business.
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According to the French newspaper "Le Monde", the banks concerned are BNP Paribas, its subsidiary Exane, HSBC, Société Générale and Natixis, the investment bank of the French savings banks and cooperative banks. Only the Société Générale confirmed the raid on request, but without further details.
As the public prosecutor's office further announced, some of the investigations go back to a criminal complaint or a mandatory complaint of the tax authorities. The ongoing operations would have required several months of preparation.
In addition to 16 judges from the French Public Prosecutor's Office and more than 150 investigators from the Department of Judicial Investigations of the French Ministry of Finance, six German prosecutors from Cologne who work within the framework of European judicial cooperation are involved. The public prosecutor's office in Cologne did not want to comment on request.
Common practice
The "-" trading differs from the stock exchange transactions ("-ex"), which have already been declared illegal in Germany by the highest court by the Federal Finance Court and the Federal Court of Justice. However, tax savings are also the focus of "-" transactions.
In the current case, a foreign shareholder of a company listed in France temporarily transferred the securities he held to a French institution around the dividend record date in order to avoid payment of withholding tax. In Germany, the black-red federal government had restricted business retroactively to 1 January 2016. According to estimates by Mannheim financial scientist Christoph Spengel, the tax damage in Germany will amount to up to 30 billion euros.
The fact that the practice was common among many financial institutions is shown by the results of several surveys conducted by the financial supervisory authority Bafin and the Bundesbank in 2017. Accordingly, 85 financial institutions participated in "-" transactions. While the tax processing is progressing through various judgments of the fiscal courts, there is so far only one indictment against former board members and employees of the former Depfa Bank.