What You Need to Know:
- Let's be frank, filing taxes can be a huge pain in the butt and oftentimes you're just sitting there in the tax office filling out forms for what feels like hours. So it's understandable when big players like ufotable somehow seemed to slip up on paying their taxes on time, leading to a pretty serious lawsuit against the giant anime studio.
- According to sources in the industry, it was stated that the studio behind the Fate series along with Kimetsu no Yaiba, failed to pay taxes of up to 139 million yen, and hid around 446 million yen in income.
- Seeing all of the massive success that the studio has been having, it seemed like the Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau were keeping a close eye on things behind the scenes and eventually found the moment to strike with a filed complaint to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office. The complaint stated that company president Hikaru Kondo violated corporate and consumption tax laws, which could put him in hot water if not dealt with.
- To make things a little worse for the president, it was reported that he asked his wife, who runs much of the accounting for the company, to exclude roughly 100-200 million yen from the books. In addition, the tax demons searched his home only to find 300 million yen cash was hiding away in his safe. Yikes...sounds like fate is sealed on this one and that no sword will be strong enough to slay this behemoth called the tax bureau anytime soon. We can only hope that things turn out for the better so that we anime fans can still enjoy ufotable's wonderful catalog of titles. We'll keep you updated as the situation progresses.
That's definitely a big YIKES..
I hope they'll be able to sort things out so that way we don't end up losing a big anime studio..