BUSINESS BRIEFS
Abu Dhabi to buy 9.1% stake in Daimler
Advertiser news services
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BERLIN — Abu Dhabi is poised to become the biggest shareholder in Daimler AG after the German maker of luxury cars, buses and trucks said it would sell nearly $2.72 billion in shares to the country's Aabar Investments PJSC.
In a statement released yesterday by the Stuttgart-based company, Daimler said Aabar will buy 96.4 million new Daimler shares at a price of $27.87 each.
The move will give Aabar a 9.1 percent stake in Daimler, bigger than the 6.9 percent stake held by Kuwait.
Aabar's biggest shareholder is the International Petroleum Investment Co., which in turn is owned by the Abu Dhabi government.
IRS AUDITS OF MILLIONAIRES DROP BY THIRD
IRS audits of taxpayers with income of $1 million or more declined by more than a third last year, despite the agency's claims that it stepped up scrutiny of wealthy taxpayers, a new study says.Audits of wealthy taxpayers dropped at least 36 percent in fiscal 2008 from 2007, according to a report released today by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC is a research group affiliated with Syracuse University.
The drop in audits affected returns filed by taxpayers who earned income at the height of the real estate boom, before the economy turned sour, the report said.
In December, the IRS acknowledged that audits of wealthy taxpayers fell in 2008 but said the decline was much lower. In fiscal 2008, the IRS said, wealthy taxpayers had a 5.6 percent chance of being audited, down from 6.8 percent a year earlier. The IRS attributed the 19 percent decline to a drop in enforcement staff from the year before. Also, the IRS said, it had to divert staff to handle billions of dollars in stimulus checks.
