The massive Dutch civil service pension fund ABP has been accused of avoiding tax on a shopping centre investment in Britain, the Financial Times reports.

ABP has a 25% stake in Westfield Stratford City, which is Europe’s largest shopping centre. However it, and Canada’s biggest pension fund, paid an effective corporate tax rate of 0.5% in 2012, the Unite union said.

ABP has 2.8 million members and is one of the biggest pension funds in the world.

Government fund

‘While tax minimisation by multinationals has unfortunately become the norm, we were deeply concerned to learn about the complicity of a major government pension fund in a significant tax dodging scheme,’ Unite’s general secretary Len McCluskey said in a letter to the chairman of both funds.

Unite estimates that in 2012 the shopping centre, which is home to more than 300 brands including John Lewis, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose, made profits of £39.7m and paid £211,028 in tax, the Financial Times says.

A spokesman for ABP’s asset manager APG told International Pension and Investments magazine: ‘In all the investments we do, we stick to international and national laws on taxes, and this Westfield shopping centre investment has been done in agreement with [British tax office] HMRC.’

APG naturally always tried to minimise its costs, he said, and taxes were one aspect of that.