The General Secretary of Public Revenue of Greece puts Greek taxpayers’ real estate abroad under scrutiny, in cooperation with the 84 countries registered in the automatic information exchange system.
Greek Tax Authority is going to scrutinize incomes derived from properties’ rents, while an investigation is underway whether money used to acquire these properties has evaded taxation.
Greek Tax Law states that if a foreign country’s real estate income tax rate is 10%, then the property owner is subject to an additional 5% tax to the Greek fiscal authorities, since in Greece the minimum real estate income tax is 15%.
For example, of a property owner has an annual income of 10.000€, he will need to pay 10% tax to their country of residence (1.000€ of tax), plus an additional 5% (500€ of tax) to the Greek tax authorities.
Moreover, according to the reputable Greek daily newspaper “Kathimerini”, Greek tax officers are embarking on a large- scale investigation that will review real estate purchases and whether the funds used for their acquisition, had derived from legitimate resources. If the investigation reveals respective breaches of tax law, and depending on the property’ s date of acquisition (since the limitation of legal proceedings is always looming), then taxpayers will be asked to provide a detailed account on how the amassed the funds used for the purchase; otherwise they will be subject to heavy surcharges and penalties.
In parallel, according to greek newspaper “Kathimerini”, the Greek Tax Authority will check if the properties were bought with money, that had never been reported in Greece as income. In this case and depending on the date of acquisition of the property – as there is the issue of limitation – if the auditing authorities ascertain that there are deviations and the purchase of the property is not substantially justified, they will ask taxpayers for further explanations and compulsory recovery measures will be taken.
