Building a tax fairyland in Luxembourg in five not-so-easy steps

The Walt Disney Co., in 2009, moved a bit of its magic kingdom into the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

1) Disney’s Netherlands subsidiary transfers ownership of five companies worth $522 million into a Luxembourg company referred to in the documents as WedcoLux 1.

2) A Disney U.S. subsidiary called Wedco International Holdings Inc. transfers ownership of 16 companies such as The Walt Disney Company Germany and Buena Vista Television Australia, worth €2.1 million, to a second Luxembourg company referred to as WedcoLux 2.

3) WedcoLux 1 and WedcoLux 2 transfer their shares into the third Luxembourg company, which is simply referred to as Wedco S.C.A.

4) WedcoLux S.C.A. transfers ownership of many of those companies to a U.K. company called Walt Disney International Ltd., which is already a subsidiary of WedcoLux S.C.A.

5) WedcoLux S.C.A. moves ownership of WDI Ltd., and by extension more than a dozen Disney subsidiaries in Europe and Australia, into a Cayman Islands-registered company called Hammersmith Ltd.

Related: Luxembourg tax deals for Disney, Koch brothers empires revealed

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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.