Fit them for prison stripes
Tax cheats Dolce & Gabbana sentenced
- Last Updated: 3:45 AM, June 20, 2013
- Posted: 2:18 AM, June 20, 2013
ROME — An Italian court yesterday sentenced celebrated fashion-house duo Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana to one year and eight months in prison for avoiding taxes totalling about $266 million.
The two were also ordered by the court in Milan to pay a fine of about $665,000 to Italy’s national tax agency.
Lawyers for Dolce and Gabbana, whose celebrity clients include Beyoncé and Madonna, immediately said they will appeal, and under Italian law the sentence will be suspended in the meantime.
They were accused of having transferred control of their brands to a shell company in Luxembourg in 2004 and 2005 to avoid paying Italian taxes.
AFP/Getty Images
GOING OUT IN STYLE: Fashion duo Domenico Dolce (left) and Stefano Gabbana, with Katy Perry last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were sentenced to 20 months for tax evasion in Italy.
Prosecutors had argued that setting up the Luxembourg company Gado — an acronym of the surnames of the two designers — while the company was operating out of Italy was a bid to defraud the state.
They had called in May for the designers to be jailed for two years and six months.
In her closing speech at the trial, prosecutor Laura Pedio said there was “rock-solid proof” that the duo had committed “sophisticated tax fraud.”
“Cases as complex as this one are the most insidious,” Pedio said, describing Gado as “a sort of cloud with the consistency of gas.”
Fellow prosecutor Gaetano Ruta said Gado was “an artificial construction the aim of which was to get a tax advantage.”
No comments:
Post a Comment