French shipping group CMA CGM’s headquarters were searched last year by French tax authorities on suspicion that the owning family has attempted to avoid paying domestic taxes, Bloomberg News reports.
French shipping group CMA CGM, which has just published a quarterly financial report showing tripled operating earnings, has become involved in a taxation case, as part of which its headquarters in Marseille were searched last year, reports Bloomberg News.
Even though authorities’ search of the company’s main office took place in June last year, it hasn’t become public knowledge until a recent tax case emerged.
According to Bloomberg, French authorities hold that CMA CGM’s Lebanese holding company was actually established as an attempt by the owning Saadé family to avoid paying French taxes, even though the family members are French citizens.
No details were provided on the tax liabilities that may have been avoided.
The court in Aix-en-Provence ruled on June 2 that even though the holding company in question, Merit Corporation SAL, had a local management group in Lebanon, strategic decisions regarding the company were made in France by Jacques Saadé until his death in 2018, and since then by his children.
CMA CGM has no comment on court ruling
Rodolphe Saadé has been at the helm of CMA CGM since 2017.
”It was correctly assumed that Merit Corporation was being led and controlled by the Saadé family,” whose members are all French citizens, the court stated in a ruling.
According to Bloomberg, the court meeting addressed the fact that the holding company’s lawyers had attempted to get the court to rule the search by tax authorities illegal. The court denied the motion.
CMA CGM’s representatives declined to comment the case following the court ruling. The group has not mentioned the case on its website, either.
WPO has contacted CMA CGM for a comment.
The French container line, the world’s third-largest after MSC and Maersk, like the rest of the sector, has for almost two years seen record earnings due to the red-hot container market seeing sky-high freight rates.
Most recently, CMA CGM, which includes a logistics branch, revealed in its Q1 interim report that it had tripled its bottom line compared to the same quarter last year.
CMA CGM presented a profit of USD 7.2bn, up from USD 2.1bn in Q1 last year.
