Question - Tax Efficiency

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aberdeenhornet

aberdeenhornet

Well-Known Member
Jan 25, 2011
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Inverurie
If I'm not mistaken the club has significant losses to offset against future tax bills. Is it possible to transfer high value players from Udinese for nominal fees and sell them from WFC immediately at huge profit which can be retained against the previous losses? Just a thought of how the club can effectively be break even very quickly.
 
For any business, when transfering assets or buying and selling between subsidiaries, this should be done at an arm's legnth price. Either this will be the market price (if there is an obvious market price, e.g. if Udinese sold us a team bus, it would have to be accounted for at the price of second-hand buses) or at a "transfer price" (by which I mean transfering any asset, not just a footballer), which may be estimated by accountants or economists or tax specialists. However, it is not clear what the price of a promising young player should be, and I can certainly imagine that they could try it on.

It would be up to the Italian tax authorities to challenge (as it would be the Italian tax payer losing out) and they would have to try to prove the transfer price to us was too low. Lots of multi-national firms get into trouble with the taxman trying to shift assets around the world in this way, and sometimes even come to agreements with the tax authorities what the transfer price should be before they go ahead and do it in order to avoid future legal wranglings.
 
The Italian tax authorities are clueless, they have so many sets of rules they don't know their arse from their elbow. It's even more difficult when EU countries are involved. They just implemented a change to try to claim VAT on products my company sells to a Pan European Distributor that they ship directly to Italy and all other EU countries. We used to sell them to their holding company in Switzerland and the Italian Tax bods wanted to claim VAT - we changed the invoice address to the Disti's office in Czech Republic, job done.
 
F1Hornet said:
For any business, when transfering assets or buying and selling between subsidiaries, this should be done at an arm's legnth price. Either this will be the market price (if there is an obvious market price, e.g. if Udinese sold us a team bus, it would have to be accounted for at the price of second-hand buses) or at a "transfer price" (by which I mean transfering any asset, not just a footballer), which may be estimated by accountants or economists or tax specialists. However, it is not clear what the price of a promising young player should be, and I can certainly imagine that they could try it on.

It would be up to the Italian tax authorities to challenge (as it would be the Italian tax payer losing out) and they would have to try to prove the transfer price to us was too low. Lots of multi-national firms get into trouble with the taxman trying to shift assets around the world in this way, and sometimes even come to agreements with the tax authorities what the transfer price should be before they go ahead and do it in order to avoid future legal wranglings.
Click to expand...

Well put F1.

The main thing - however - is that profits (or losses) can only be transferred between a company where they are owned (more than 50%) in the EU by the same parent company. Watfords new parent company is no longer Watford Leisure - but is now something like Hornet Owners or some nonsense like that (I remember reading it somewhere but cant remember the exact name!); this is highly unlikely to also be the parent company of either Udinese or Granada. While the clubs are all owned by Pozzo, they cant therefore transfer the losses...unless of course I've not got the parent company structure correct.

The other comment with regards to young players and their values etc - basically, players that come through the youth system at a club have no value in the accounts of a football club and as such all proceeds on sale will go through as a profit. Players who are signed, however, have a value which depreciates (i.e. gets lower) over the length of their contract. If the player is sold for lower than their "value" (or accounting value anyway) then this goes in as a loss in the accounts, and a profit if the sale price is higher. As F1 points out, however, if the companies are all under one umbrella for the parent company, no profit or loss will be recognised in the accounts and the "value" placed on a player due to the size / length of their contract oustanding will be the amount that goes through the recipient accounts.

Or something like that anyway...<whistle>
 
That was what the situation was with Rene Gilmartin where he went on loan to Yeovil and Crawley. Although I wonder if the rules state what the definition of a season is for a player that moves between a club that plays in a winter league and one that plays in a summer league? (e.g. England and Republic of Ireland)
 
could be p(45) for a few of our players. I prefer the old p(85) myself though. OK, my tax knowlegde is summarised in the previous sentence. <whistle>
 
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