Of the richest 100 Belgian families, 64 are beneficiaries of a company in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. De Tijd wrote this on Saturday based on non-public data that the newspaper could view. This usually concerns so-called post office box companies that merely serve as a financial and tax structure. Le Soir also participated in the study.
Source: Belga, De Tijd, Le Soir
The data reported by De Tijd are not public and date from April this year. The figures show that of the richest 100 families in our country, almost two in three are beneficiaries of vehicles in the Grand Duchy.
Three-quarters of these cases concern so-called post office box companies. They have no employees and only use an address in Luxembourg that is sometimes provided by hundreds or thousands of other companies. In these vehicles, the families house investments, cash, real estate, luxury goods and shares in their Belgian and foreign companies. According to De Tijd, the total value of all those investments is 91 billion euros.
Luxembourgish holding companies are more tax efficient than Belgian ones, especially if they are only intended for passive investing. The income from this is not taxed, the beneficiaries only owe an annual ‘subscription tax’.
According to De Tijd, investor Marc Coucke also has four Luxembourg postbox companies. According to the newspaper, they have a total of more than 130 million euros on their balance sheet.