From the Corriere della Sera Newsletter of 1 July: “There is a caveat, and how. It is the agreement reached at the G7 on the exclusion of American digital giants from paying the Global minimum tax (Gmt). With the Gmt, multinationals with more than 750 million turnover would have to pay a tax of at least 15%. Without Gmt, not even that.
For Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti it would be ‘an honourable compromise that protects our companies from automatic American retaliation’.
De Bortoli’s judgement, in his column Fragments, is opposite: “Why should large companies, not American ones, also be subject to an international tax agreement conceived, over the years, precisely to counter the shameful avoidance of those web multinationals that today one would like to save? The compromise, if there is one, will be dishonourable to Europe and also, in its own small way, to the Italian centre-right, which in its election campaign has always promised to fight the evasion of large foreign groups, especially digital ones. But Trump had not yet arrived in the White House’.
If you want to understand why De Bortoli is right, read Amazon and big tech will never pay taxes.
