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The relationship between the tax authorities and taxi company Uber seems very close.

According to the investigative journalists, the tax authorities shared confidential information with Uber and may have committed criminal offences. The State Secretary wants to investigate this further and report to parliament on this. This was announced by Van Rij, who was born in Rotterdam at a meeting in Brussels about European tax policy. He takes the publications very seriously but is not immediately defensive.

Van Rijn is currently doing well with the fact that the House of Representatives is on summer recess. The UberFiles that were published last week have not yet led to strong reactions in political The Hague. “This Uber affair shows how deeply rooted the double standard is in our government institutions, especially at the tax authorities,” said Mahir Alkaya, Member of Parliament of the Socialist Party, when asking parliamentary questions.

“I will investigate this further. I will report that to our parliament”

According to the reports in Trouw, Alkaya thinks it is bad that the Netherlands sticks to the secret agreements with multinationals, the so-called tax rulings. “These large companies are offered security, while citizens are made more and more insecure. I know people who consciously do not use certain schemes, such as allowances, because they do not have the confidence that they can actually keep that money. With things like this, that mistrust only increases. We now find out about this Uber case because you dug into it. But there are plenty of companies that we don't have that information about. I wouldn't be surprised if this is just the tip of the iceberg."

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UberFiles

Have hundreds of leaked files exposed how Uber bribed top politicians. Leaked files show that Uber has lobbied at the very highest levels of politics to remove resistance to the taxi service. The names of current French president Emmanuel Macron and former Dutch European Commissioner Neelie Kroes are perhaps the most striking. They would help Uber with lobbying. That is the conclusion reached by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has examined 124.000 internal documents of the technology company.

from Rij

Marnix van Rij was appointed State Secretary for Taxation and Tax Administration on January 10, 2022 in the Rutte IV cabinet. In 1983, van Rij started his career as an assistant tax advisor at Moret Gudde Brinkman Tax Advisors The Hague and was previously government commissioner for Sint Eustatius and strategic advisor to the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, based in Bonaire.

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