in full boom from the series TorrentSantiago Segura and his business group carried out a series of operations with which they would have tried to circumvent the payment of hundreds of thousands of euros to the Treasury. This is clear from an investigation by the Central Delegation of Large Taxpayers included in a judgment of the National Court to which EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA, from the Prensa Ibérica group, has had access, and which details how, through a complex series of accounting movements of his production company buddies within his business group, AE William Holding, SL, the producer tried to benefit from a “double tax use of the same loss & rdquor ;.
The Tax agencyhowever, he followed all his movements and issued a settlement in 2016 that has recently reached the National Court, where the claim to cancel a debt of €827,183 that the Santiago Segura group of companies maintains with the Treasury. The reason for this debt, the magistrates explain, is the irregular compensation of the negative tax bases of Amiguetes in the declaration of the Corporation tax for the period 2010-2011.
To this amount were added at first two sanctions imposed by the Madrid Regional Inspectorate for “serious tax infraction” and that in total amounted to 719,972 euros, which would have brought the lawsuit to more than €1.5 million. However, the Central Economic-Administrative Court agreed with Segura’s defense and annulled both fines, although not the debt.
A decision that the National Court has upheld when estimating that, despite the fact that the issue is “legally controversial”, the debt with the Treasury persists. The ruling is still subject to review by the Supreme Court, and, before it, as explained to this newspaper Maria Luisa Gutierrezrepresentative of Santiago Segura and CEO of Amiguetes, are “assessing” filing an appeal.
“Without questioning the content of the sentence, simply saying that we always act based on the fact that what we were doing was done correctly, and, for that, we always act guided by top-level legal advisers,” Gutiérrez defends before EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA.
“Constant and large losses & rdquor;
Following Santiago Segura’s business maneuvers during that decade, however, is not easy. The director, who is one of the most successful figures of the last decades of Spanish cinema, decided in 2008, three years after the premiere ofTorrent 3: The Protectorbuy NetJuicea technology company that offered computer support services in the midst of the awakening of the Internet and that ended up being integrated into the current buddies in 2009.
Despite the fact that the NetJuice project started off strong and even had a former general director of Inditex as president, according to the judicial documentation to which EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA has had access “since its constitution in 1999 and up to the year 2008 , especially in the years 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003, NetJuice incurred in constant and heavy losses”.
At the same time, however, the production company Amiguetes Enterprises, which was incorporated as a company in 2002 and ended up being absorbed by NetJuice, was only reaping green figures. During those years, Torrente became the most lucrative saga in the history of Spanish cinema with more than 81.2 million euros collected at the box office and 16.3 million viewers, according to official data, and it was in Amiguetes where Segura sheltered “the ownership of the group’s patents and brands.” Among them, of course, the Torrente universe.
Torrente, a production of Amiguetes
The only film in the saga in which Amiguetes did not participate was the first,Torrente, the foolish arm of the lawwhich premiered in 1998, was seen in the cinema by more than 3 million people and came to collect more than 10.9 million euros at the box office, according to data from the Ministry of Culture and Sport. For that first installment, Santiago Segura won the Goya for best new director and Tony Leblanc took the best supporting actor.
With that tailwind, Segura founded Amiguetes Enterprises, better known simply as buddiesand already participated 50% in the production of Torrent 2: Mission in Marbella, according to the official registry of films of the ministry. In the case of the third and fourth installments, Amiguetes assumed 100% of the production, while in the fifth, released in 2015, it assumed 70% of the production, since Telefónica was in charge of the other 30%.
To understand the moment in which both companies arrived at the merger in 2009, while NetJuice had own funds at the end of 2008 of 62,909 euros and had barely received 33,705 euros from its activity, buddies He had his own funds €3.3 millionhad “developed the group’s most important film production activity in terms of revenue generation” with torrent 3 and “held ownership of the group’s patents and trademarks”, explain the magistrates of the National Court.
tax engineering
These figures are not, however, the most transcendental for the Treasury with respect to the case for which it carries out the liquidation, but rather those declared by Amiguetes (NetJuice + Amiguetes Enterprises) in the 2010 corporation tax: negative tax bases of €7,190,657of which only 9,761 had been generated once NetJuice was integrated into the Segura group.
In other words, the rest of the losses had been generated before the purchase by the group owned by the director. At the time of the acquisition, NetJuice was a company that had a large amount of accumulated losses that it could potentially offset with the IRS once it had income, and therefore pay less tax, but it had little activity.
At the time of the purchase, NetJuice had a share capital of 8.1 million euros thanks to a recent increase in the then sole shareholder, but that did not mean that, as explained by the Madrid Regional Inspectorate, “the compensation of the negative tax bases of the company [NetJuice] years prior to entering the group for having given rise to losses in the previous partners”. In fact, the company only cost the Santiago Segura business group 137,130 euros.
The reasons why Santiago Segura decided to buy this company in 2008 are unknown, with which, according to a ruling dated May 3 to which EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA has had access, neither he nor his group, A E William Holding, they had been in a relationship until then.
In any case, it was after that purchase that the actor and director began to make a series of moves within the group for its integration with Amiguetes Enterprises. Among them, for example, he came to do what is known as a “accordion operation“, which consists of reducing the share capital of a company to zero to eliminate losses from the balance sheets and, practically immediately afterwards, increasing it again by issuing new shares. This is usually done, among other reasons, to renew the shareholders of a company.
“Avoid decomposition”
“We are aware of the complexity of the case and of the different interpretations that can be made, since it is the AN magistrate himself who says that, there being two similar precedents, one in favor of the Treasury in 2009 and another in 2017 in favor of the taxpayer, it has not been easy to solve. Regardless of whether we appeal or not, there is room for interpretation of the rule and a difference in criteria”, points out the representative of Santiago Segura and CEO of the production company.
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The key point for which the Treasury considers that there is a debt in its favor of 827,183 euros is for this alleged “double tax use of the same loss.” A circumstance that would have occurred, according to the Tax Agency, as a result of the merger between Amiguetes and NetJuice through a formula known as improper mergerwhich is nothing more than the union of two companies that already had capital from each other and that are now integrated as a single structure.
Despite the fact that from an accounting point of view it may have significance that Amiguetes absorbed NetJuice or vice versa, the liquidation agreement issued in 2016 and that has been disputed reasoned, as this newspaper has learned, that for the Treasury it was “indifferent the way in which the business concentration operation was carried out, therefore, regardless of whether the merger operation was direct or reverse and regardless of which entity the group decided to assume the role of absorbed company in said operation , what is intended is avoid tax disposition due to the double use of losses that can occur whether the company with negative tax bases is the absorbed entity or the absorbing company”.