The Ladurée house and Paul bakeries … everyone knows them, but who can put a face to the owners of these brands? By surfing on the concepts of “traditional bakery” and “high-end pastry”, they opened 900 stores in nearly 50 countries.
At the head of this multinational, a very discreet family: the Holders. This discretion also applies to group accounts, unpublished, and personal assets. In Luxembourg, parents and children have thus invested tens of millions of euros. The traces of these operations are visible in the documents obtained by the journalists of “Complément d’études”: accounting balance sheets, notarial acts, the most recent of which date back to 2019. All come from the Luxembourg trade register. They are among those on which the OpenLux operation was based, as well as Mediapart for an investigation.
The journalists of “Complément d’Investigation” entrusted them to a former tax auditor, who spent several days analyzing these hundreds of pages. According to these documents, each family member has a company domiciled in Luxembourg. Holder International for the parents, Francis and Françoise; MH5 for Maxime Holder; H’Corp for David; Epajona for Elisabeth, their younger sister.
For each of the three child-owned companies, “we are not very far from the 20 million subscribed capital“, she notes. That is to say about sixty million euros in all, invested by the parent company … By a clever system of share buybacks between companies, the Holder parents could thus have transmitted, over the last ten years, a part of their fortune to their children.
Why was this transfer of assets made in Luxembourg?
For the former controller, who points out that “there is a fine line between optimization and tax evasion“, these documents “ask a lot of questions“. Is this a deliberate desire to avoid tax in France? Why was this transfer of assets made in Luxembourg?
The journalists had two other questions to ask the Holders: does this financial package, still active in 2019, still exist? Is it known to the French tax authorities? But they refused to answer … It will therefore be necessary to be satisfied with these declarations of Françoise Holder dating from 2017: “I confirm to have always paid my taxes in France and not to have yielded, personally, to the singers of exile tax”. “A certain number of [ces] companies (…) are the personal companies of my three children, who all reside abroad “;” Most of the key companies in the group (…) have been subject to tax audits in the last two years by the French authorities, ”she said.
Excerpt from “Paul and Ladurée: the secret story of billionaire bakers”, a document to see in “Complément d’études” on October 28, 2021.
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