Spiegel: Millions of taxpayers from European and German virtual companies and Malta

Virtual group subsidiaries and branch offices such as the well-known BMW, Bosch, BASF, Deutsche Bank and Puma are established in Malta. Many are not even listed in the phone book, nor are they staffed. Three of them share the same bell, while Lufthansa maintains 18 subsidiaries in the EU member state, which has become a tax haven, causing other member countries to lose tax revenue of billions of euros, as Spiegel reveals.

The Maltese lures business groups and companies with dreamy low tax rates. This is reflected in the thousands of pages of papers evaluated by the German magazine in collaboration with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) research network. Spiegel also reveals the perilous practices used by German companies, whose subsidiaries resort to Malta for tax evasion in their country.

In particular, two "MaltaFiles" data packets have been obtained in the European Investigative Collaborations Network (EIC), which provide a fuller picture of the Maltese company establishment system and reveal the mothers of those established there. According to these data, large groups of companies of the DAX index of Frankfurt are based in Malta - through their subsidiaries. Specific examples cited by Spiegel are the German giants BMW, BASF, Deutsche Bank, Puma, Merck and major companies such as Bosch and Rheinmetall. Only Lufthansa has 18 subsidiaries in Malta.