Germany investigates 2,000 phantom companies based in Malta

The German authorities were yesterday said to be inquiring on about 2,000 phantom companies based in Malta , many times linked to big German companies and suspected of fraud, after having received anonymous information in this regard.

"There are (in this list) subsidiaries of big German enterprises,” the Finance Minister of the North-Rhine-Westphalia, Norbert Walter-Borjans said in Berlin yesterday.

This region has been, for the past years, very active in its fight against fiscal fraud by Germans who put their money outside of Germany, to escape taxes, in Switzerland, Lichtenstein or other places.

According to the minister, there are ‘grave suspicions’ that these Maltese companies linked to German companies engage in tax evasion, mainly through the setting up of companies called ‘letter holes’fictitious enterprises destined to dissimulate financial transactions.\

The North Rhine-Westphalia region received at the end of April, through an anonymous informant, a CD with a list of the 70,000 companies registered in Malta.

From these 70,000 companies, between 1,700 and 2,000 are connected to German companies, according to the minister.

Since 2006, the authorities of many German states, including that of North Rhine-Westphalia have obtained through anonymous sources CDs or USB keys containing information on persons suspected of fraud.

In 2010, the German tax authorities recuperated €1,600 million from tax evaders thanks to the purchase of these databases.