Recently, U.S. fast-food chain McDonald's will pay France 1.245 billion euros (about 8.7 billion yuan) to avoid criminal prosecution for tax evasion.
This is the largest settlement agreement ever reached with a taxpayer in France.
The Paris court confirmed the approval of McDonald's to pay a 508 million euro public interest fine.
McDonald's has about 1,500 stores in France.
In 2014, the French tax authorities began investigating McDonald's tax problems in France, suspecting that the name was artificially reducing taxable income in France.
Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Panama, Luxembourg...
These place names, which ordinary people do not necessarily know, are the "tax havens" that many rich people and their accountants love to use.
According to statistics, the world's major countries transfer $21 trillion in assets to these places every year for tax avoidance purposes.
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So much money, for Xiaobian, it can only be a zero number...
With about 32,000 locations in 119 countries on six continents, McDonald's represents an American way of life in many countries.
France is proud of its own food culture, and many people are hostile to McDonald's as a representative of the invasion of the American way of life.
McDonald's is just one of several multinational companies facing long-term tax investigations in Europe. They have all been accused of tax avoidance by using royalties between business units to transfer profits or otherwise.
Some of the similar cases were treated harshly in court.
Obviously, doing big business in Europe always has the day of "spitting" back. Netizens who often watch financial news should have become commonplace for anti-monopoly fines in Europe, and apple, Amazon and other companies we are familiar with have faced huge fines from EU countries.
On the 16th of this month, McDonald's issued a statement saying that it was pleased to see the end of this legal dispute and promised to "make every effort to comply with the law." McDonald's has also said that France is one of the countries that welcome McDonald's restaurants the most.
In fact, as early as 2018, EU regulators once believed that McDonald's practices were legal.
However, the French could not accept McDonald's approach. In 2019, the same financial prosecutor reached an agreement with Google for which Google paid more than 965 million euros in retroactive taxes and fines to resolve its tax dispute in France.
Next, for the majority of ordinary people like xiaobian, how the rich usually avoid taxes.
● Bridging, which transfers profits through third-party bridging, that is, intervening in a third party in cross-border transactions, using three operations such as inverted acquisition of tax avoidance land and constructing a "catheter company" or a "stepping stone" company.
● Repetition, multiple billing increases pre-tax deduction, and the same matter is processed multiple times through different channels. For example, it is possible to sign a framework contract with multiple heads and blur the cost boundary to achieve duplicate charges.
● Stealth, invisible related party transactions to avoid attention, add non-related intermediate links in related party transactions, or conceal unreasonable related party transactions, constituting invisible related party transactions and avoiding the attention of regulatory authorities.
● Transformation, the transformation of the surface form to pay less tax, enterprises usually will be the type of trade, the nature of labor services, contract content or employment forms and other transformations, etc., and finally achieve the purpose of transferring profits and underpaying taxes.
The above mention is just the tip of the iceberg in the twists and turns of the rich.
Thinking of McDonald's's "settlement gold" of up to 8.7 billion, Xiaobian can't help but wonder how many hamburger fries and wheat whirlwinds mcLaths have to sell in more than 32,000 stores around the world to make so much money. What I didn't expect was that hamburgers could make money, but McDonald's didn't just make money from hamburgers.
Crocker, the founder of McDonald's in 1997, said in his speech that my real business is real estate.
McDonald's distributes the profits of fast food to franchisees, and then goes to earn money for renovation fees and empowerment systems, and stores have to pay 4.5% of turnover as a system management fee, which generates an average of 33 billion yuan a year, while the above two parts of the revenue account for only 50% of McDonald's total profits. Another big piece is commercial real estate. The world's largest commercial real estate company is not Simon, Wanda, but McDonald's.
As can be seen from McDonald's 2020 financial report, McDonald's direct revenue was $8.139 billion, and franchise (franchise store) revenue reached $10.726 billion. In McDonald's home country of the United States, franchise stores earn twice as much as direct stores.
Among the revenue rules of franchise stores, rental income is the highest.
McDonald's way of joining is: before finding a franchisee, the headquarters first finds the most suitable location for opening a store, builds McDonald's, and then brings the storefront with signboard equipment and subleases it as a whole.
The rent of the store is not fixed, and in general, the franchise royalty is about 4% of the profit, while the rent percentage is 10%.
There is a McDonald's in Guomao and Sanlitun each, and Guomao McDonald's has a monthly revenue of 1 million, and Sanlitun can only earn 500,000 yuan. Then, even if the land prices of the two places are similar, their "rent" will be a full 1 times the difference.
I have to say that we still know too little about the fast food business.
Recently, did you go to McDonald's to eat big Macs?