Meta: escaped beyond 887 million euro, legal representatives investigated. The Milan Public Prosecutor's Office, in fact, has closed the investigations against the legal representatives of Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, owner of the social networks Facebook e Instagram, for alleged tax evasion of over 887 million euros. The prosecutor Marcello Viola announced this in a press release. The sum emerged following investigations by the Financial and Economic Police Unit of the Gdf based on the failure of the giant to submit a value added tax declaration for the years from 2015 to 2021.
Prosecutors Giovanni Polizzi and Cristian Barilli, as stated in a note from prosecutor Marcello Viola, have today notified the notice of conclusion of the investigations "against the legal representatives of the Irish company Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, owner of the social networks Facebook and Instagram", following the investigations of the Economic and Financial Police Unit of the Guardia di Finanza of Milan.
The investigations have ascertained, it is stated, "how the Meta group, in order to allow users to use its software and related digital services, acquires and manages, for commercial purposes, data, personal information and interactions on the platforms of each member, so as to establish a relationship of a synallagmatic nature with the users of the service, by virtue of the direct connection in terms of quantitative and qualitative proportionality between the opposing services”.
Relationship "brought back, for the purposes of the application of the Value Added Tax, within the regulatory framework referred to in Article 11 of Presidential Decree number 633/72, as a permutation operation".
The investigations have allowed "to highlight the analytical elements of fact and law suitable to support the configuration, in the hands of the legal representatives" of Meta, "the entity providing the service and owner of the processing of the data provided by the user, of the crime of 'failure to declare' for VAT purposes pursuant to Article 5, paragraph 1, of Legislative Decree no. 74/2000 for the tax periods from 2015 to 2021". They would have "failed to declare a taxable amount of €3.989.197.744,05", or almost €4 billion, "which corresponds to an evaded Value Added Tax of €887.623.503,69".
In essence, the unpaid VAT concerns the registration of users on social platforms. Registrations that are free, but with the user who in reality pays a sort of "fee" because it makes its personal data available and with the potential profiling of that data. And it is precisely through this exchange, formally free, that Meta can still make a profit. Profits that, based on legal and fiscal assessments, must be taxed, according to the prosecutors, with the application of the value added tax, which Meta, instead, has never paid over the years.
