QCOSTARICA – The General Directorate of Taxation of the Ministry of Finance announced this week that “it will deepen the control actions that it has been carrying out, to determine any involvement of Costa Rican taxpayers in maneuvers such as those revealed this weekend in the framework of the cross-border investigation called ‘Pandora Papers’ led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
Carlos Vargas, General Director of Taxation, stated in a press release that, “regardless of where the payments are made, if the source of the income is a Costa Rican source, those responsible for making them must comply with the country’s tax regulations.”
Read more: Dos Pinos, three offshore, cooperative and transnational
“The foregoing, in reference to the information disclosed by the ICIJ about national companies that created corporate structures outside of Costa Rica, to pay their executives a part of their salary under the figure of professional services provided, supposedly, to affiliated companies in the abroad, in order to pay less taxes and social charges,” the document indicates without specifying the name of any company.
In the framework of the transnational investigation, Costa Rica Noticias and the Latin American Center for Journalistic Investigation (CLIP) disclosed that the Dos Pinos Milk Producers Cooperative registered an offshore company, in October 2019, in Panama, whose shareholders are two other paper companies called First Caribbean Investment Company and Transnieve Ltd, registered in the British Virgin Islands and Barbados, respectively.
These jurisdictions are considered tax havens that can be used for tax avoidance or evasion.
Dos Pinos does not export to those countries, and the journalistic investigation also failed to determine what the business line of the Dos Pinos companies is in those nations.
Meanwhile, in a statement released by the dairy producer indicated that: “The companies that the Cooperative has in Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Panama, Barbados and the Dominican Republic, serve only to be able to operate commercially in those countries and regions.”
Likewise, he indicated that since the parent company is a cooperative located in Costa Rica, “the results of all those companies domiciled abroad are consolidated in our country and that money is part of the integral results of the Cooperative, which in part is they distribute among the producers in the form of surpluses ”.
Meanwhile, the Director of Taxation, Carlos Vargas, explained that as part of his intelligence actions, the Tax Administration has carried out complex cases of taxpayers who use various maneuvers to evade their tax responsibilities. “As a result of these investigations, we have recovered significant amounts for unpaid taxes and, to date, we have filed 24 complaints before the Public Ministry, also with the objective of recovering resources that for tax justice correspond to each and every Costa Rican,” he said.
