Our Investigation Reveals How Palantir Legally Drains the Treasury, While in Germany the Trail Disappears into Darkness

Last year, Palantir reported approximately £320 million in revenue in the United Kingdom and paid less than £1 million to the Treasury. Let those two numbers sit side by side for a moment, because only then does the sheer audacity reveal its full scale. The Treasury, which lectures us week after week about empty coffers, may finally have found the explanation.

The trick has an innocent name. It goes like this: revenue is not profit. It is the favorite formula of accountants who have become priests of the difference between what comes in and what ultimately gets taxed. Inside that gap lies what advertising calls magic and tax law calls legal tax planning. Our investigation revealed just how carefully this shield has been constructed, a loophole of the expensive, elegant variety, costing the company a few professional fees while depriving the country of many times that amount in tax revenue.

What makes it obscene is not merely the loophole itself, but where the money flowing through it comes from. Palantir draws its millions from public contracts. It has embedded itself within the National Health Service through the Federated Data Platform, the very central data project whose contract is already under close scrutiny. The company profits from the state while simultaneously denying the state its share. It drinks from the well while refusing to replenish it. Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley said he could hardly believe that Palantir was extracting millions from the country while lawmakers were fighting for greater oversight of that very same data contract. Mothin Ali, Deputy Leader of the Green Party, said the findings demonstrate with alarming clarity how much this company takes from the country while giving so little back.

Read also our article: Europe’s billions for Palantir - profits over rights, data over democracy

You do not have to be an enemy of free markets to condemn this. It is enough to read the man who founded the very idea. Adam Smith, the patron saint of free enterprise, warned about those who live from profit, arguing that their interests often run directly against those of the public. Whenever people in the same trade gather together, he wrote, their conversations rarely end without some quiet arrangement against the public interest. Palantir is that warning made flesh and translated into server farms. What is happening here is theft that never breaks a window. It wears a tie and fills out every form correctly, entirely within the law, and that is precisely what makes it worse. The Treasury is not being emptied by waste, but by design. The largest technology companies drain the state and then sell it the software with which it is expected to manage its own decline.

In Germany, the problem emerges elsewhere. Palantir is making millions here as well through public contracts with police authorities in Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Baden-Württemberg, along with other projects across the public sector. The North Rhine-Westphalia project alone costs taxpayers approximately €39 million. How much corporate income tax and trade tax the company actually pays in Germany remains largely hidden from public view. Here, it operates through Palantir Technologies GmbH, which is registered in the German Bundestag's lobbying register, where its lobbying activities can be found, but not a single publicly reported euro of German taxes or profits.

Neither revenue nor profit, nor the company's actual tax burden, can therefore be traced, let alone examined through any level of transparency that would allow meaningful public oversight. Meanwhile, the ordinary German taxpayer sits over a tax return that requires every euro to be declared down to the last cent, while a company drawing from those very same public coffers allows its tax reality to disappear behind complex corporate structures. Full disclosure applies to the ordinary citizen. They are audited and, if necessary, their assets are seized. For the multinational corporation, the opposite applies. The larger and more powerful it becomes, the darker the window through which the public is allowed to look. The little guy is pursued down to the very last cent. The big guy does whatever he wants.

In the end, one striking contradiction remains. A company that prides itself on seeing everything, every movement and every byte of its citizens' data, displays remarkable consistency in overlooking only one thing, its own tax burden. They know us down to the last byte. No one knows their contribution to the common good, and that is no accident. That is the product.

To be continued .....