Olympic scale tax avoidance

Only 15 brands have bagged the title “Worldwide Olympics Sponsors” – the highest level of Olympic sponsorship. This select few have exposure and advertising rights that few companies could dream of, and collectively provide around 30% of the games’ revenue.

While the Olympics are obviously about sports, they also carry some sort of notion of international cooperation, with organisers seeing the games as a way to create a “peaceful and better world”.

But it seems like fair tax isn’t a necessary part of their vision for getting there. 

All 15 worldwide sponsors received 0/100 for tax conduct in our recent analysis.

Fair tax could help build a “peaceful and better world”

As people worldwide struggle financially with increased food prices and the cost of living in general, corporate taxes could provide governments with income needed to provide infrastructure and support to those who need it.

Yet according to the Tax Justice Network, the world loses the equivalent of a nurse’s annual salary to a tax haven every second, and will lose nearly $5 trillion in the next 10 years.

One destination for this lost public money is executive directors’ bank accounts. Many directors of the worldwide partners are paid eye-watering sums of money. Airbnb’s SEO, for example, received $120m in total compensation in 2020. 

Nil points for brand sponsors’ tax conduct

In April 2024, we rated all the Olympics worldwide sponsors against our tax conduct standard, which weighs up the likelihood that a company is engaging in tax avoidance, and every brand received zero marks out of a possible 100.

The 15 worldwide Olympics sponsors are:

• AB InBev 
• Airbnb
• Alibaba 
• Allianz
• Atos
• Bridgestone 
• Coca-Cola
• Deloitte
• Intel 
• Omega
• Panasonic
• Procter & Gamble 
• Samsung
• Toyota
• Visa

Use of tax havens

When a company doesn’t have workers, shop fronts or factories in, for example, the Cayman Islands, but does own a company there, it’s fair to guess that it may have been set up to make the most of the jurisdiction’s low tax rates.

Owning a subsidiary in a tax haven can help a company’s overall tax payments drop, by artificially moving some of its profits to this other location, and away from the jurisdictions is actually does things in.

We list around 70 tax havens, these being chosen largely based on the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index and the Fair Tax Foundation’s list of tax havens. 

High risk company types

When the subsidiaries in tax havens are, for example, finance or holding companies, the likelihood they’re being used for tax avoidance is higher still.

All the main Olympics sponsors have at least two high risk subsidiaries in tax havens, and often far more. For this reason they received the lowest marks possible for their tax conduct.

For example, Alibaba and Allianz have finance companies in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Singapore and haven’t published any explanation why.

Main Olympic sponsors’ tax haven activities

This table lists all the tax havens the Olympics worldwide partners have subsidiaries in, based on data from the D&B Hoovers corporate database (April 2024).

The Olympic Games in Paris will take place from 26 July to 11 August 2024.

Ethical Consumer calls on all multinational companies to meet high standards of transparency across their tax affairs. Its tax rating awards marks for behaviours which include:

• publishing a policy stating how it is their aim to fairly contribute tax revenue in all the countries in which they operate
• publishing full country-by-country breakdowns of total revenue, profits and tax paid in line with GRI 207
• explain publicly the purpose of subsidiaries in tax havens and why they are not being used for tax minimisation purposes.

For those of us who like to watch the games, it would be a more comfortable watch if we knew that they were not funded, at least to some extent, through tax avoidance.