Tax authorities in Sweden have demanded $90 million in overdue taxes from crypto currency miners in the country, after government investigations showed four years of embezzlement.
Between 2020 and 2023, the Swedish tax agency, Skatteverket, investigated the operations of 21 cryptocurrency mining companies. Inquiries revealed that 18 crypto mining companies had provided false or insufficient information in order to take advantage of tax breaks.
The cryptocurrency mining companies now must pay the tax authorities over 990 million Swedish krona ($90 million) in total. This comprises unpaid total value added tax (VAT) of 932 million krona ($85.4 million) and tax surcharges of around 57.9 million krona ($5.3 million).
While the crypto mining corporations pleaded against the $90 million tax demand, the administrative court accepted two mining firms' pleas while rejecting the rest, reports Cointelegraph.com.
Oladotun Akangbe, the chief marketing officer (CMO) of Flincap Crypto Exchange, has said that controversies in Nigeria’s cryptocurrency scene are to be expected given the rise of cryptocurrency use in the country.
He said that while Nigeria's standing as a cryptocurrency leader could be compromised by the government's recent assault on local exchanges, he is, however, confident that the nation can withstand this storm.
Earlier in February 2024, Binance executives Tigran Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla had travelled to Nigeria in response to claims that the exchange had manipulated the naira, the nation's fiat currency. Nevertheless, following a meeting with Nigerian authorities over Binance's regulatory concerns, they were taken into custody and accused with five charges of money laundering. After that, Nadeem Anjarwalla broke out of detention and was found in Kenya, where he is being extradited from.
Akangbe added that the ambiguities result from back-and-forth deliberations between the Nigerian government and participants in the cryptocurrency industry.
Local cryptocurrency analysts are also disappointed with the government's disdain for cryptocurrencies as a means of easing the country's foreign exchange problem.
Cryptocurrency stablecoin Tether has said it is reorganising to move past stablecoins to add new divisions beyond stablecoin development.
The company runs the world's biggest stablecoin by market value and is the operator of the namesake Tether USDT stablecoin.
The company said in an official announcement on April 18, 2024 that it has introduced four new business divisions into its new framework: Tether Data, Tether Finance, Tether Power, and Tether Edu. Tether Data intends to concentrate on making strategic investments in various technologies, such as artificial intelligence and peer-to-peer platforms, such as Keet, Pear Runtime, and Holepunch.
