"False declaration". Tax authorities and judges move against Musk: 12.5 million requested after an audit on X

The Revenue Agency, after the investigations of the Guardia di Finanza of Milan, accuses Twitter International UK, now "X", of the failure to pay 12.5 million euros of VAT from 2016 to 2022. The Milan prosecutor 's office - the case for false declaration is entrusted to the prosecutor Giovanni Polizzi - accuses Elon Musk's social network of the same pattern as the "pilot" investigation (closed in December) on Meta and focuses on the financial and fiscal weight of data. The alleged unpaid VAT concerns, to put it simply, the free registrations of users on the platforms " in exchange " for their data and their potential profiling.

For the investigators, it is an exchange between different goods and as such subject to the VAT regime and therefore taxable. In the case of X, the Economic and Financial Police Unit of the Guardia di Finanza closed its tax audit in April 2024 and the Revenue Agency, last January, notified the " draft document" , i.e. its conclusions that match the approach of the financiers. The social network X - the former Twitter acquired by Musk at the end of 2022 - has until April to communicate with the Revenue Agency, so it will be able to comply with the requests of the Tax Office or oppose and start the tax dispute procedure.

The investigation into Twitter International UK sees two suspects - two former administrators (an Irishman and an Indian) - who have taken turns in recent years at the helm of the social network then taken over by Elon Musk at the end of 2022. The investigation stems from a tax audit by the Guardia di Finanza, concluded in April 2024, on the American platform, which is now called 'X', in the wake of the same checks carried out on Meta. The case was entrusted to the prosecutor Giovanni Polizzi , who has already been involved in other investigations into web giants. The central point of the case entrusted to Polizzi, the same one who handled the investigation into Meta, is the idea that free subscriptions to online platforms in exchange for the transfer of personal data, which have an economic value, since they allow user profiling, should be taxed as commercial transactions.

Only last December, the Milan prosecutor's office notified the notice of conclusion of the preliminary investigations against the legal representatives of the Irish company Meta, owner of the social networks Facebook and Instagram. The investigation - still open - hypothesizes for the giant the failure to declare and fail to pay - between 2015 and 2021 - VAT for a total of over 877 million euros .