January 8, 2016
The French authorities announced on Thursday that the Chanel designer was the subject of a major tax inquiry, after the newsmagazine L’Express said that Mr. Lagerfeld had used offshore tax havens in Ireland, the British Virgin Islands and the United States to hide as much as 20 million euros ($21.7 million) from the French government.
Mr. Lagerfeld is the latest famous fashion name to face such charges. In October 2014, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were cleared of tax evasion charges by Italy’s highest court after a 10-year dispute with the government over unpaid income tax worth millions. At one point in the dispute, the two men had been given 18-month suspended prison sentences and a fine of half a billion euros.
That same year, an investigation began into the tax structures in place at Prada, and the Italian tax police seized €46 million in assets from the Italian jeweler Bulgari. And in 2013, the former Valentino chairman Matteo Marzotto was indicted on suspicion of evading $75 million in taxes, relating to the 2007 sale of a chunk of the Valentino label to the private equity group Permira.