Source Today Newspaper
GREAT BAY – Attorney Ritchie Kock has asked the court to acquit Casablanca NV and its principals of filing wrong turnover tax returns and of filing returns for profit taxes too late.
The dispute between the tax inspectorate and the club is about the question whether the money prostitutes earn in the club had to be counted as turnover for the business.
“There is no working relationship between the club and the girls,” the attorney said, the labor contracts are void. The prosecution only looks at the power ratio, but it ignores other aspects of a working relationship, like the payment of salaries.”
The girls also run risks as if they were entrepreneurs,” Kock said. “If they do not work they don’t earn anything but their costs continue. The club makes money from letting rooms to the girls; it does not make money from the turnover the girls make.”
Kock quoted a ruling from the Supreme Court that says that trafficking in women leads to the nihility of labor contracts. “The prosecutor cannot have it both ways,” the attorney said. “It cannot find my clients guilty of exploitation and at the same time maintain that there was a labor contract.”
Kock said that the club’s position about the turnover tax was “fiscally defensible” and also referred to the principle of equality: “”all other clubs on the island do not pay turnover tax over the income of their girls either.”
Casablanca was late with filing profit tax returns, but this has in the meantime been repaired, Kock pointed out: “within the objection period.”
Casablanca had trouble filing in 2014 because the administration had disappeared. “There is a strong suspicion that Joan P. took them after her employment at Casablanca ended with a big row.”
