The offices of streaming giant Netflix in Paris and Amsterdam were raided by French and Dutch authorities as part of a tax fraud investigation, according to French judicial sources.
Officials from the two countries have been cooperating on this matter since the investigation opened in November 2022.
Netflix has yet to comment specifically on the raids, but insists it follows tax laws wherever it operates.
The Amsterdam office is the headquarters for the company's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The French investigation is being carried out by the National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF), a special unit dedicated to investigating serious economic crime.
These are suspicions of “concealment of serious tax fraud and clandestine work”, according to the PNF.
The company is also under investigation for its 2019, 2020 and 2021 tax returns.
The French sources indicated that Dutch authorities were carrying out simultaneous searches and that cooperation between the two countries had been going on for “several months”.
Last year, French media La Lettre reported that until 2021, Netflix in France was minimizing its tax payments by declaring its turnover generated in France in the Netherlands.
After abandoning this arrangement, La Lettre reported, its reported annual turnover in France fell from 47.1 million euros ($51.3 million; £39.6 million) in 2020 to 1 .2 billion euros in 2021.
However, the outlet claims investigators are trying to determine whether Netflix continued to attempt to downplay its profits after 2021.
Netflix arrived in France more than 10 years ago and opened its Paris office in 2020. It has some 10 million subscribers in the country, according to the AFP news agency.
