The booking site Booking.com is accused of having evaded over € 150 million in VAT in Italy. This is what the financiers of the First Group of the provincial command of Genoa and Chiavari have established, led by Colonel Ivan Bixio and Captain Michele Iuorio, as part of an investigation into the maxi evasion of the company based in the Netherlands. According to the investigators, coordinated by the substitute Giancarlo Vona and by the adjunct Francesco Pinto, Booking would have earned about 700 million euros from 2013 to 2019 on over 800 thousand transactions.
The investigation started in 2018 from a series of tax assessments on Bed & Breakfast managers, in particular in the Eastern Ligurian area. From the examination of the fiscal documents, declares the Guardia di Finanza, “it emerged that the Dutch company used to issue invoices without VAT by applying the so-called ‘reverse charge’ mechanism even in cases in which the accommodation facility lacked the relevant batch, with the consequence that the tax was neither declared nor paid in Italy “.
The military consulted the databases and open sources and with the data made available by the multinational and relating to the commissions applied to 896,500 customer positions in Italy, a turnover was reconstructed for an amount of approximately 700 million euros; on this amount, the company should have made the annual VAT return and paid over € 153 million in tax to the tax authorities. Instead, it emerged that the same did not appoint its own tax representative, nor did it identify itself in Italy and therefore did not submit the relative declaration “thus achieving total tax evasion, which was not paid either in Italy or in Holland “.