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Hankook Tire owners are being ordered by the court to pay $3.4 million or KRW4.5 billion in taxes. The order comes after the owners lost in the administrative lawsuit case.
Hankook Tire is the leading tire maker in South Korea, and the Seoul Administrative Court determined it owes taxes from its overseas capital gains income. The court decision was revealed on Thursday, July 14.
As per The Korea Times, the administrative lawsuit was the owners’ second attempt to have its tax lowered or nullified, but both cases failed after the Tax Tribunal dismissed a previous case that was filed by the tire company’s owners.
It was reported that the administrative court found that Cho Yang Rai, Hankook Tire chairman, and his son Cho Hyun Sik, have hidden income in five bank accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland. The court ruled that the father and son did it deliberately from 1990 to 2014.
The court stated that the capital gains income listed in the five accounts were not reported for more than two decades thus, the act has been determined to be intentional. Moreover, the Hankook Tire owners were not able to provide a plausible explanation as to why the two of them are holding accounts in the mentioned European countries. The court suggested that the only possible explanation is that it was for tax evasion purposes.
“Since 1990, when Cho Yang Rai first opened a bank account in Switzerland, he and Cho Hyun Sik set up an additional four foreign accounts until March 2016,” The Korea Herald quoted the court as saying in its ruling. “But none of them was reported to the tax agency.”
The court added, “The firm had little business presence in the European countries and choosing overseas accounts over local ones is not explained by any other circumstances.”
The recent ruling followed the lawsuit that was filed by the father and son to reduce the amount of taxes that were imposed by the country’s National Tax Service in 2019. At that time, the tax agency ordered the Hankook Tire chairman to pay KRW1.9 billion won while his son was slapped with KRW2.6 billion tax.
