Louis Vuitton and Australian JobKeeper payments.
Jobkeeper was designed to support Australian Businesses who expected to experience a 30% reduction in turnover.
Louis Vuitton Australia, anticipated that their turnover would reduce, and therefore claimed Jobkeeper, so that they could continue to keep paying their employees.
Louis Vuitton’s financial statement to ASIC showed that they received $5,965,000 in JobKeeper for 2020.
Their financial statement also showed that their total revenue from sales actually increased, they did NOT reduce.
Their profit also increased, from $29.5 million to $54.9 million.
Dividend payments to shareholders were increased by $6.4 million, from $26.4 million to $33 million.
In theory, a decent company would voluntarily repay the Jobkeeper payments received. But I assume they say they thought that turnover would drop, and that is sufficient to keep the taxpayers support.
In other News:
Harvey Norman, has paid back the $6.02 million in JobKeeper subsidies that they received over the 2020 and 2021 financial years, ($3.63m for 2020/21 and $2.39m for 2019/20). This came after their annual profits increased by $521 million (78.8%) in 2020-21. This does not include the JobKeeper subsidies for the franchised stores that operate independently to Gerry Harvey’s ‘Harvey Norman’ owned stores.
At least 21 other public companies have returned some or all of the Jobkeeper payments that they received.
These included:
- Nine Entertainment: $2 million returned from $2.6 million received.
- Dominos Pizza: $800,000 returned from $800,000 received.
- Nick Scali: $3.56 million returned from $7.1 million received.
- Blackmores: $2.4 million returned from $3.4 million received.