Bono’s offshore tax affairs leaked...
BONO used a company based in low-tax Malta to buy a shopping centre in Lithuania, documents referred to as ‘the Paradise Papers’ reveal.
The Ausra mall was bought for €5.7million ten years ago through Maltese firm Nude Estates, of which he was a director.
Ownership of the centre was later transferred to a company in low-tax Guernsey, Nude Estates 1.
Maltese firms pay tax at just 5%. In Guernsey there is no tax on company profits. Taking profits to Ireland would, however, incur tax.
A spokesman for Bono told the Guardian newspaper: ‘Bono was a passive, minority investor in Nude Estates Malta Ltd, a company that was legally registered in Malta until voluntarily wound up in 2015. Malta is a well-established holding company jurisdiction within the EU.’
Bono, 57, has previously been criticised for touring the globe calling for more Third World aid and debt relief, while he is a multi-millionaire who could have paid more in tax to help the poor if U2 had remained based here in Ireland. Instead, it has already emerged that much U2 money flows through the Netherlands, where a favourable tax regime reduced payments and maximised profits for the band.
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’.
The 13.4million documents in the Paradise Papers lay bare how thousands of rich and powerful individuals invested vast sums of money in murky offshore structures.
The papers also reveal that millions of pounds of the Queen’s private money is invested in offshore funds in Caribbean tax havens. The Duchy of Lancaster, which manages investments for her €580million private estate, invested around €10million in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda-based funds.
And firms run by the Russian state made massive investments in Facebook and Twitter, through a business contact of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to the papers.
The revelation shows that Russia made millions out of the American internet giants, and will fuel mounting concerns about how Vladimir Putin has made use of the social media firms – including to influence the result of the US election last year. The documents show that Russia’s state-run VTB Bank and the state-run gas and oil corporation Gazprom ploughed money into the key social media companies around six years ago
VTB put €130million into Twitter shares, and Gazprom went through a series of investment bodies to help amass Facebook shares worth an astonishing €703million.
Both Russian state companies are subject to US sanctions, so rather than openly buying the shares in their own company names, they were purchased indirectly with the help of investment funds managed by ex-pat Russian technology tycoon Yuri Milner.
Potentially embarrassingly for President Trump, who continues to deny growing claims of Russian entanglement in his successful election campaign, Mr Milner holds a share in a firm part-owned by Mr Kushner, who is married to Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka and is a senior White House adviser.
Russian computer mogul Mr Milner, born and educated in Moscow before stints at a US university and the World Bank in Washington DC, worked with the Russian government in 2009 on making services available online.
Papers reveal wealth of rich and powerful