Mark Cuban Protests Tax Inversions

Billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has a message for U.S. multinational corporations considering an inversion.

“If I own stock in your company and you move offshore for tax reasons I’m selling your stock,” Cuban said in a series of tweets. “There are enough investment choices out there.”

Corporate inversions refer to the practice of a large U.S.-based company acquiring a smaller, foreign company, merging and declaring corporate residence in the latter country. Usually, this move allows the new company to enjoy a significantly lower tax rate compared to the U.S. rate of 35 percent – one of the highest in the developed world. In recent years, there has been a spate of tax inversions as politicians promise to crack down on the practice.

In a CNBC interview, Cuban clarified his point, insinuating that the tax cost to wealthy investors of allowing inversions would, in aggregate, cost them more than the gains seen from holding shares in inverted companies.

“Evaluate [the] big picture,” Cuban told investors via CNBC. “By not selling your stock, does that encourage other companies to do the same thing, which means even larger tax shortfalls, which it costs us even more over the long-term, which means your net-worth is going to go down?”

In another interview with CNBC, President Barack Obama acknowledged that corporate inversions are still technically within companies’ legal right, but insisted that the practice is un-American, according to America’s Markets.

“I think most people would say: ‘If you’re doing business here, if you’re basically still an American country, but you’re simply changing your mailing address to avoid paying taxes, then you’re really not doing right by the country and by the American people,'” Obama told the news source.

Considering the senate elections draw near, the topic of corporate tax inversions is becoming talked about more and more through Washington. As tax attorneys in the metropolitan area, James F. McDonough and I have written about this topic at considerable length. Here are some of our other posts about tax inversion:

• Inversions To Be An Election Hot-Button Issue
• What Corporate Inversions Are Telling Us (And What Washington Refuses To Hear)
• Treasury Secretary urges Congress to end inversions
• New Congressional Report Highlights Tax Inversions
• Medtronic the Latest Company to Propose Tax Inversion
• Report Shows How Much Walgreens Stands To Gain with Inversion
• Levin: Bill limiting corporate inversions later this week
• Senators consider closing tax inversion loophole