Chilean authorities expect to recoup more than $1.5 billion in unpaid taxes as a result of ICIJ investigations, according to data obtained from the country’s tax agency by ICIJ media partners CIPER Chile and LaBot.
The Servicio de Impuestos Internos, or SII, data covers more than 200 audits launched following ICIJ investigations, including the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Bahamas Leaks. The amount treasury ultimately recovers may change depending on the outcome of court challenges. Audits related to the Pandora Papers are still ongoing.
The bulk of the estimated $1.5 billion-plus — nearly 99.9% — is linked to the 2017 Paradise Papers that revealed how corporate giants like Apple, Nike and Uber utilized the offshore financial system to avoid taxes through imaginative bookkeeping maneuvers.
While the SII data doesn’t cite specific cases, based on a review of separate government records, CIPER and LaBot said the outsized figure likely corresponded to a single ongoing case linked to a 2022 claim against Swiss mining giant Glencore, which an audit determined owed a large sum of unpaid taxes. Glencore has challenged the amount claimed by the SII in court.
Glencore was one of a number of multinational companies that appeared in the Paradise Papers, which CIPER covered in Chile at the time. The investigation, led by ICIJ in collaboration with 95 media partners, was based on a leak obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung of 13.4 million documents from offshore law firms and company registries in some of the world’s most secretive jurisdictions.
The Paradise Papers revealed how Glencore underwent a corporate restructure that allowed its Chilean subsidiary to make a $534 million “loan” to another part of the company registered in Bermuda, which tax experts warned CIPER could be a way of concealing profits to dodge taxes.
Glencore told CIPER and LaBot that it had “a difference of opinion” with the SII regarding the income tax paid in 2019.
“The difference lies — mainly — in the interpretation of the tax effects derived from the dissolution of a foreign company owned by Glencore, which has no relation to accusations of tax evasion by the Internal Revenue Service,” Glencore said.
The SII has opened 216 audits following ICIJ investigations and identified 711 taxpayers and 26 territories linked to the disclosures, CIPER and LaBot reported.
The more than $1.5 billion that the Chilean treasury said it expected to collect as a result of the audits shocked ICIJ members Alberto Arellano and Francisca Skoknic, from CIPER and LaBot, respectively. After receiving the SII data from a freedom of information request, they submitted another expecting a correction. The second dataset matched the first.
“[Arellano] said, ‘It looks like they misplaced the comma.’ Because there were too many zeros,” Skoknic told ICIJ. “It was a number so impressively large that we thought it was an error.”
If collected, the money could hypothetically finance up to five large hospitals, the reporters said. In theory, they estimated, that would add more than 3,000 beds, 110 operating rooms, 30 delivery rooms and five emergency care centers — with heliports — to Chile’s healthcare network.
Skoknic said the data helped to quantify something usually intangible: the societal value of investigative journalism.
To put the $1.5 billion figure in context, ICIJ has calculated that, as of 2021, governments across the world have recovered $1.36 billion from the Panama Papers alone.
