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Solvay descendant Bernard de Laguiche has resigned from the boards of directors of the listed companies Solvay and Solvac. The dismissal ‘for personal reasons’ came after ICIJ and De Tijd asked De Laguiche questions about the leaked Pandora Papers at the beginning of September.
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On Tuesday, De Tijd, together with Le Soir, Knack and the consortium of investigative journalists ICIJ, revealed that several Solvay families have set up structures in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands and Panama. There they have for years housed their shares in Solvay, one of the largest companies in our country. We discovered this in more than a thousand documents that were leaked from the trust office that helped set up the structures. Those leaked documents are part of de Pandora Papers, nearly 12 million documents leaked at 14 offices setting up such structures.
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Pandora Papers
In the Pandora Papers, documents have been leaked from 14 offices that set up structures in tax havens. They open a Pandora’s box, containing more than 11.9 million files about mailbox companies in notorious tax havens. It concerns 2.94 terabytes of confidential data. The Panama Papers, which limited the disclosures to one law firm in Panama, sparked a torrent of financial scandals around the world five years ago.
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Together with the consortium of investigative journalists ICIJ and more than 600 journalists from 150 media around the world, De Tijd examined the documents of the Pandora Papers for months. It is the largest collaboration in journalistic history. With the help of Knack and Le Soir, we plowed through more than 33,700 files that referred to Belgium. We tracked down 1,217 Belgians or residents of our country, who had a total of 1,215 PO box companies and trusts set up in tax havens.
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Read all articles www.tijd.be/pandora
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Bernard de Laguiche, now 62, was one of the Solvay scions who appeared in the Pandora Papers and was involved in the constructions. He had worked for Solvay since 1987 and was the group’s number two, from March 2006 to September 2013, as CFO. At the end of 2013, the Laguiche exchanged our country for a place in Brazil. He even named one of his offshores in the British Virgin Islands after his Brazilian farm Cagibi. But until recently, de Laguiche was also still a director of the chemical group and an alloy director of Solvac. The latter is the Belgian listed company in which many Solvay descendants are shareholders and which owns more than 30 percent of the capital in Solvay.
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