Bono ‘in tax ruse to buy Lithuanian mall’
Bono, lead singer of U2, used a company based in low- tax Malta to buy a shopping centre in Lithuania, the Paradise Papers documents reveal.
The Ausra mall was bought for £5.1 million ten years ago through Maltese firm nude Estates, of which the rock star was a director.
ownership of the shopping centre was later transferred to a company in low-tax Guernsey, nude Estates 1.
Maltese firms pay tax at just 5 per cent. In Guernsey there is no tax on company profits. Taking any such profits to Britain, or Ireland, would however incur tax.
A spokesman for Bono told The Guardian: ‘Bono was a passive, minority investor in nude Estates Malta Ltd, a company that was legally registered in Malta until it was voluntarily wound up in 2015.
‘Malta is a well-established holding company jurisdiction within the EU.’ Bono – real name Paul Hewson – has been fawned over by world leaders since he began touring the globe calling for more Third World aid and debt relief.
Critics have observed that he is a multi- millionaire himself who could have paid more in tax to help the poor in the West and overseas if U2 had remained based in their native Ireland. Instead, it had already emerged that much U2 money flows through the netherlands, where a favourable tax regime reduced payments and maximised profits for the band.
But Bono said two years ago that the band ‘paid a fortune in tax’, and brushed off criticisms of the Dutch branch, saying that it was ‘just some smart people we have working for us trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed. And that’s just one of our companies, by the way. There’s loads of companies’.
Bono, 57, has bought himself a villa on the French Riviera, a Manhattan penthouse, and a huge mansion in Dublin for whenever he pops home.
He is also famous for always wearing his sunglasses, which he blames on an eye condition.
But he has seen himself as the ideal person to lobby Conservative and Labour party conferences about helping deprived countries, as well as securing audiences on the same subject with then-US president George W Bush, South African statesman nelson Mandela, and the sitting Un secretary general Ban Ki-moon.
not all music fans are impressed by his antics. When Bono performed with his band at the Glastonbury festival in 2011, protesters raised a giant banner in the crowd with the message ‘U pay tax 2’.
‘Sensible about way we’re taxed’