According to our information, the Pro Plus company has a branching ownership structure that leads directly to the Curacao archipelago, which is considered a tax haven. And the monopoly of the state-owned company Telekom, which specifies mandatory schemes for cable television, allowed the channels of the company to be included within the package from cable operators – otherwise viewers would have had to pay extra. The huge profits of Pro Plus thus go directly to tax havens and avoid the Slovenian income tax.
Profits of POP TV, Kanal A and other channels go to tax havens
A detailed look at the ownership structure of Pro Plus reveals a shocking tangle of companies that all lead to the tax haven of Curacao, which is where the only founder of the Netherlands company CME MEDIA ENTERPRISES owns a business. This was revealed on the Tax-Fin-Lex portal by the tax expert Ivan Simič, who had found the official data in the Slovenian commercial register. When he wondered why the Pro Plus company had such an ownership structure, the only logical explanation was that it is probably due to the withholding tax. According to Simič, Pro Plus should be calculating and paying income tax at a rate of 5%, in accordance with the agreement between Slovenia and the USA on avoiding double taxation and preventing tax evasion.
A big slice of the cake
After losing the right to broadcast over an antenna a year ago, the Pro Plus media company, which is influenced to a large degree by Gregor Golobič, a former politician from the ranks of ZSMS, LDS and Zares, and Drago Kos, the husband of the editor of the news programme, Tjaša Slokar Kos, sidestepped the legislation and ensured that watching its channels POP TV and Kanal A will not be payable. Cable operators had not been prepared to pay for Kanal A and POP TV because the channels were available for free with an antenna, but the channels nevertheless succeeded in getting into the packages of cable operators (which is unattainable for most Slovenian television stations) due to the Inspectorate of the Republic of Slovenia for Culture and Media at the Slovenian Ministry of Culture. Pop TV and Kanal A are also the reason for increases in the subscription fee for cable television. We have also sent questions about the sum paid by cable operators for their channels to the director of Pro Plus, Pavel Vrabec, but we are still waiting for the answers.
Peter Truden