Italy Details Amnesty Haul

by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels

16 July 2010

In an explanatory document, Italy’s Ministry of the Economy has given further details of the previously undeclared assets repatriated from abroad or regularized by Italian residents during the whole period of the latest Italian tax amnesty from its inception on September 15 last year.

The original expiry date of the tax amnesty was December 15, 2009, but that was extended from the end of that month to April 30 this year. The penalties imposed on Italian individuals who repatriated or regularized undeclared funds during the amnesty were increased from 5% in its initial period to 6% for funds declared between January 1 and the end of February 2010, and 7% for declarations from March 1 to April 30, 2010.

It was reconfirmed that assets totalling EUR104.5bn (USD133bn) were declared during the period of the amnesty – 97.6% of which were repatriated to Italy, with the remainder regularized. However, it had not been previously disclosed that those funds were found in such a wide variety of countries.

While assets totalling EUR71bn were declared out of Switzerland by around 105,000 Italian residents, followed by Luxembourg with EUR6.8bn (by more than 7,000) and San Marino with EUR5.8bn (by around 20,000), funds were also found from other, more unexpected, countries.

Italian citizens also repatriated assets from such countries as Romania, Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Palestine, Montenegro, Mongolia and the Vatican, which are not usually counted within the list of destinations for undeclared funds.

It is also confirmed that the revenue return to the Italian authorities was some EUR5.6bn from the taxes and penalties receivable under the amnesty. The declarations made totalled some 206,600, with an average value therefore of around EUR506,000.

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