The Tax-Shelter is another lever, a financial one, which has allowed the Belgian audiovisual sector to develop much more rapidly and harmoniously than in other countries. The Tax-Shelter is a tax incentive introduced by the federal government to encourage investment by Belgian companies in the production of approved audiovisual and cinematographic works.
For those unfamiliar with the process, this incentive enables a company investing in the production of an approved Belgian audiovisual work to benefit from an exemption on its taxable profits of up to 150% of the amount of the investment.
The structure of the landscape that has been organized around the Tax-Shelter is constantly changing. At first, small companies were created to raise funds, then the banks got involved. Today, we can see that more and more players in the audiovisual sector are tending to extend their territory of choice, both upstream and downstream. Some production companies are developing distribution units while companies specializing in Tax-Shelter have started production… Global integration is the order of the day.
The arrival of Go-West is part of this dynamic. It is the meeting of ten actors (five public and five private) in the service of a structure whose vocation is to find companies (Hainaut and Walloon Brabant) ready to invest in audiovisual productions via the Tax-Shelter mechanism, thus raising funds to boost each other’s projects.
The five private partners behind this new company are Dame Blanche SA, Victor Studio SA, MediaRes SA, Virtualis SA and DreamWall SA, with Léon Parahia being appointed managing director of Go West. Of these five partners, three are companies co-financed by Wallimage Entreprises.
The capital of the company is 200.000 €: 101.000 € are brought by the private shareholders founders and 99.000 € brought by the Public Invest IMBC (12.500 €), NivelInvest (12.500 €), SambrInvest (12.500 €), HoccInvest (12.500 €) and Wallimage Entreprises which with its 49.000 € holds 24,5 % of the global capital. The sacred union of these five public partners is a great first of its kind, guaranteeing confidence and stability.
The involvement of the Walloon fund is quite logical. In addition to its solid track record and truly encouraging prospects, Go West brings essential synergies: the projects that will be developed thanks to the funds raised by this new company will benefit regional technical service providers, also supported by Wallimage Entreprises.
We said it from the start: everything is in everything.
