According to The Guardian, Gucci’s offices were “raided last week over suspected tax evasion.”
Confirming an earlier report from Italian newspaper, La Stampa, the luxury fashion house told The Guardian that it was “providing its full cooperation to the respective authorities and is confident about the correctness and transparency of its operations.”
According to Angelo Cremonese, an economics professor cited in the story, Gucci has “a Switzerland entity [that] the tax authorities suspect is an Italian company for tax purposes,” which triggered the raid.
Gucci has had an insanely successful year — sales grew 49.4 percent in the third quarter alone — but now joins Prada (who owed €470m in back taxes in 2014), Giorio Armani (who owed €270m in the same year), and Dolce & Gabbana (who owed €1bn, also in 2014) as high-profile Italian fashion houses who’ve come under fire.
And that means four out of the five major Italian fashion brands have all been busted for tax evasion. Not sure what to make of that…
In totally unrelated news, Racked is reporting that Forever 21 is getting sued for putting a camera in an employee bathroom, the footage from which leaked onto a porn site. That’s a real news story. Forever 21 is claiming the camera was put there to prevent shoplifting, although, if that was true, you’d think they’d put one in the employee break room as well (they didn’t). Nothing to do with tax evasion, but holy shit what a terrible company F21 is!
You can read more about it at The Guardian (and Racked).
