In the area of fundraising, there are voices that say that it gets together badly and awkwardly. The truth is that legislation has opened up several gaps to circumvent or circumvent the tax. Tax fraud is something else, although on many occasions the limit between the two is very fine. That is what big companies, multinationals, business groups have an advantage in. The “Irish double” and the “Dutch sandwich” are widely used tax reduction strategies.

For example, in the Netherlands you can set up a company whose sole purpose is to collect the intellectual property of a company based in Ireland. Then, Dutch society can allocate 99% of the proceeds to another tax haven. Everything is legal, but it is not within the reach of any company. For example, IKEA plays this way, since its headquarters are in the Netherlands, not in Sweden.

However, local legislation offers companies other tools, as money and an important structure are needed to be able to use the above described. It is not just a tax issue, as in some cases they are widely used to argue “economic reasons”. Having benefits and saying that the economic situation is bad are not contradictory if concrete tools are used.

In recent years, as an economist, I've seen many times what I'm going to explain in the following lines of my career. I will use an apparent example to make it understood. Suppose a small company A (25 employees), belonging to the retail sector. It places the premises, owned by the same owner, on behalf of another company (expressly created, B). The supplies are handled by another company of the same owner (C) that sells these supplies to the initial entrepreneur (A). The owner has three companies, but has grouped the majority of the costs into one, in the A.

What is the objective of the other two companies? In the case of Company B, the owner pays the rent to himself. You can go up or down to reduce profits in Company A. In the case of Company C, you can play with the prices to get profits from the products of Company A. You can indebtedness with banks A, getting money from A at no cost for B and C. In short, the costs and expenses will always be in society A. This is not an “Irish double” and a “Dutch sandwich”, but it is a great game in companies in the peninsular Basque Country. It's legal.

Who are the losers of these behaviors? The workers, of course. For “economic reasons” there are wage cuts, reductions in employment contracts, redundancies... In our territory there is economic growth that goes to capital income (the pockets of entrepreneurs). This can also explain the current growth.