Music followers are hitting again at controversial YouTuber Logan Paul for accusing Puerto Rican reggaeton celebrity Dangerous Bunny of benefitting from the island’s beneficiant overseas tax breaks, which the singer has beforehand criticised.
Mr Paul, who mentioned in 2021 the “main motive” he relocated to the island was for monetary advantages, accused Dangerous Bunny of being a hypocrite throughout an look this week on the Philip DeFranco Present on YouTube.
“It’s robust as a result of I really like Dangerous Bunny. I feel he’s an incredible entertainer, I feel he’s a generational expertise, however I do discover it hypocritical as a result of Dangerous Bunny is a Puerto Rican, dwelling in Puerto Rico, who’s privately making the most of the identical tax program that he’s publicly condemning,” Mr Paul mentioned.
Mr Paul was referencing Act 22, a 2012 regulation permitting overseas businesspeople to obtain exemption from taxes on passive revenue like shares and crypto in the event that they spend money on native residential property.
In a current music video for his track “El Apagón,” Dangerous Bunny incorporates a documentary about inequality in Puerto Rico, the place journalist Bianca Graulau calls out Mr Paul by title as one of many rich foreigners driving gentrification, environmental injury, and inequality on the island.
Mr Paul didn’t present proof of his claims, solely saying “I do know this” and “There are native Puerto Ricans who find out about this” on the YouTube present.
“Once more whereas I really like Dangerous Bunny, I can not personally assist the hypocritical nature of his exploitation,” Mr Paul added.
The Impartial has contacted Dangerous Bunny, his supervisor, and Logan Paul for remark.
It could seem unlikely that Dangerous Bunny is benefitting from the programme the vlogger is referencing. These born in Puerto Rico don’t pay US federal taxes, however are additionally largely ineligible for the motivation tax schemes the island’s authorities has arrange in recent times.
To profit from Act 22, recipients can’t have lived in Puerto Rico for the final 10 years; Dangerous Bunny, actual title Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, has lived in San Juan as not too long ago as 2020 and was born in Puerto Rico.
Followers of the artist and residents of Puerto Rico had been livid with the accusation.
“BREAKING: White colonizer tries to gaslight and bend the reality after his emotions had been damage after being referred to as a colonizer,” Twitter consumer @elcielodeabril wrote in response to a clip of Mr Paul talking about Dangerous Bunny.
The allegations of benefitting from the tax programme are critical enterprise in Puerto Rico, the place many locals really feel the federal government has bought out the island to rich overseas businesspeople and traders as a way to flee a yearslong governmental finance disaster.
As one resident says within the Dangerous Bunny music video, if issues stick with it at their current case, “We’ll be foreigners in our personal land.”
The inflow of recent property house owners in Puerto Rico has additionally had environmental results, destroying essential mangrove habitat and blocking sections of seashore which might be public below Puerto Rican regulation.