International taxes

Alphabet Inc.’s Google moved 15.9 billion euros ($19.2 billion) to a Bermuda shell company in 2016, saving at least $3.7 billion in taxes that year, regulatory filings in the Netherlands show.

The name that Republican tax writers gave to a new, multibillion-dollar business levy implies that it targets foreign earnings from “intangible” intellectual property—hitting tech firms and drugmakers like Apple Inc. and Pfizer Inc.

The Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department will generally allow existing loans and other related-party transactions involving the overseas affiliates of multinational corporations to be taxed at the lower of two preferential rates, according to an official notice.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said the U.S. tax reform will cut profit this year by about $5 billion, mainly because of a tax targeting earnings held abroad.

A provision in the new tax law, intended to prevent American companies from shifting profits abroad to benefit from a lower overseas rate, might also hit the largest foreign banks with significant U.S. operations.

Fund manager David Gorton sued a U.S. law firm for fraud after its lawyers convinced him to buy into a carbon-credit investment that they had an undeclared financial interest in, according to a London lawsuit.

The top tax rate that U.S. companies would pay on an estimated $3.1 trillion in earnings they’ve stockpiled overseas crept up to 15.5 percent in the final version of the GOP tax bill released Friday.

Ikea is the latest company ensnared in the European Union’s sprawling tax probes as regulators look at whether the retailer’s revenue deals in the Netherlands allowed it to avoid hundreds of millions of euros of taxes.

Amazon.com Inc. will pay 100 million euros ($118 million) to the Italian tax authorities for the period of 2011-2015 in a settlement that closes the fiscal probe by the country’s tax police, Italy’s Revenue Agency said in an emailed statement Friday.

Facebook Inc. is changing its tax structure so that it will pay taxes in the country where sales are made, rather than funneling everything through its Irish subsidiary.