2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-06-06 02:02
“In Italy I have lost money so far, the hope is to break even, but nothing more. Here then there are obstacles such as labor laws and the cost of employees .
So he sentenced bitterly Joe Bastianich in an interview released some time ago to Panorama.
And it seems that his restaurant in Cividale in Friuli, the renowned Orsone.
A stumbling block with a grim face and the hooked hands of the Italian taxman who complains against our Bastianich for a tax evasion of several hundred thousand euros.
For now, the tycoon is not in trouble directly, but two legal representatives of his company, along with two officials of Esra, the regional agency for rural development, who have turned a blind eye, or even two, to the facts. disputed.
What are these facts?
Simple. The Orsone restaurant has been classified since its inception, both fiscally and legally, as a "farmhouse", thus enjoying the considerable tax advantages of these categories of businesses.
The farm, however, has very specific requirements in order to be qualified as such, both in terms of the opening days and the dishes served, which must mainly come from the company's own crops.
And if when the Orsone opened its doors it could (perhaps) be in possession of these requirements, it then lost them along the way with an ever-increasing influx of customers.
The fact is that Bastianich, through his lawyer, makes it known that he has submitted in due time a request for a change in the commercial category of the Orsone, from a farmhouse to a normal commercial establishment, but that everything has then run aground, or rather bogged down, in the delays. of the cumbersome bureaucracy (and how not to believe him, holy man …).
In fact, it seems unlikely that those who own the beauty of 25 restaurants around the world, which feed about 3,000 people and who have annual incomes of the order of 15 million dollars, will use to manage their businesses., of technicians unable to correctly classify its profitable activities or, worse, seeking such naive tax loopholes.
If ours had really intended to deliberately do what he is accused of, that is, of having subtracted shovelfuls of taxes from the Italian tax authorities, he would certainly have been more careful, even in the choice of collaborators, of this we are sure.
As we are also certain of its commercial agility and flexibility. Because, as he himself says, “I don't have to morally justify my every decision to the whole world”.
But to the taxman, yes.