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Criminal prosecutors and customs investigators raided Adidas’s headquarters in Germany for a second consecutive day on Wednesday, an escalation of a multiyear probe into suspected tax evasion by the sports brand potentially worth more than €1.1bn.
The Luxembourg-based European Public Prosecutor’s Office said on Wednesday that it was pursuing a “criminal investigation” against a German “corporate group trading in sportswear” over “suspicions of tax evasion relating to customs duties and import sales tax”.
It added that the potential offences happened in Germany and Austria and were “to the detriment of the EU budget”.
The EPPO did not name Adidas.
Adidas confirmed the raids, and said that it was “co-operating with the authorities and providing the necessary documents and information.”
Besides the Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach, several other business locations and employees’ private residencies were raided, according to people familiar with the matter.
One of the people told the Financial Times that the search warrant put the suspected cumulative tax damage at more €1.1bn, a figure first reported by Handelsblatt.
EPPO, the German customs authority, and Adidas declined to comment on either the amount or the number of individuals involved.
Adidas said that it did not expect “any significant financial impact” from the probe, adding that it had been aware of the investigation “for several years”. It said the issue was caused by “different interpretations of German and European law” and stressed that the company “continues to work closely with the customs authorities”.
The company said that the conduct in question took place between October 2019 and August 2024. In 2022, Adidas disclosed “higher provisions” for “customs-related risks”, which it did not quantify.
At the time, it said that the provisions were included within a €350mn one-off hit to operating profits. That total also included the cost of the wind-down of its Russian operations, a settled legal dispute and restructuring expenses.
On top of the provisions, Adidas has already covered some of the tax and tariff claims, people familiar with the matter said.
A large part of the disputed tax claims refer to import VAT that Adidas did not declare and pay, the people added, and as the company would receive tax refunds equal to the same amount, they would not affect Adidas’s profits.
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