…Or else maybe Nike’s off-shore shell game has changed. In any case, there’s something fishy in Bermuda.

Citizens for Tax Justice drops the anchor (how many cliches can I use in one post?):

It’s far more common to see bare feet than sneakers on the streets and beaches of Bermuda, but major athletic footwear manufacturer Nike reports having six subsidiary companies on this island nation with population of about 65,000 people. That’s six less than the dozen it reported last year, but it’s still a lot.

….So what happened to the missing Nike subsidiaries? It’s possible that they were sold. But it’s also possible that the company simply hopes it can get away with not disclosing this potentially-embarrassing information going forward.

One thing is clear: whatever else may have changed in the past year, Nike definitely still has substantial foreign cash stashed in low-tax havens. We know this because Nike is one of the relatively-few Fortune 500 companies that disclose how much tax it would pay on repatriation of its permanently reinvested earnings (PRE). The company estimates that if it repatriated its offshore cash, it would have a $2.1 billion tax bill on their $6.6 billion in PRE. This is a 32 percent tax rate, the implication of which is that they’ve paid about 3% on their offshore profits so far. And it’s hard to find a foreign tax rate that low outside of, say, Bermuda.