Bakers sued for alleged aggressive tax avoidance

Baker & McKenzie is being sued for £11.7m over an allegedly 'aggressive financial engineering' arrangement which was put in place through a Luxembourg shell company.

Reinhard Tiburzy

The German food flavourings company Symrise has brought the case after the scheme resulted in a Mexican subsidiary ended up paying out most of the £11.7m in tax. A war of words has broken out between Symrise and its former legal advisers. The claimants argue that 'no reasonably competent Mexican tax adviser' would have drafted an arrangement which saw the Mexican subsidiary being deemed to have taxable income in the way that Baker & McKenzie did. For its part, the law firm said that Symrise and its group companies are the 'architects of the misfortune that they now find themselves in'. Source: Legal Business

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