A Singapore Sling is a
tax avoidance
Tax avoidance is the legal usage of the tax regime in a single territory to one's own advantage to reduce the amount of tax that is payable. A tax shelter is one type of tax avoidance, and tax havens are jurisdictions that facilitate reduced taxe ...
scheme in which a large
multinational company sells products to a subsidiary owned by them in a jurisdiction with lower tax rates, which acts as a 'marketing hub'. The subsidiary then sells the product to end users, marking up its value and attributing the mark-up to various marketing activities undertaken by the subsidiary. The parent company retains a higher profit margin due to the lower tax rate. Singapore is a popular location of such subsidiaries, given its low tax rates and its willingness to grant large multinationals '
sweetheart deal
A sweetheart deal or sweetheart contract is a contractual agreement, usually worked out in secret, that greatly benefits some of the parties while inappropriately disadvantaging other parties or the public at large. The term was coined in the 1940 ...
s' – an extremely low tax rate in exchange for locating the multinational's marketing activities in Singapore.
Since at least 2015, it has been under investigation as an abusive practice in Australia.
See also
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Tax exporting
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Tax inversion
A tax inversion or corporate tax inversion is a form of tax avoidance where a corporation restructures so that the current parent is replaced by a foreign parent, and the original parent company becomes a subsidiary of the foreign parent, thus mov ...
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Double Irish
The Double Irish arrangement was a base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) corporate tax avoidance tool used mainly by United States multinationals since the late 1980s to avoid corporate taxation on non-U.S. profits. (The US was one of a sma ...
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Dutch Sandwich
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Bermuda Black Hole
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K2
References
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Tax avoidance