“A useful tool” to recover “a very significant part” of the fraud attributed to a company: the Minister of Public Accounts Gabriel Attal defended Wednesday before the Senate the interest of judicial conventions of public interest (CJIP).
Created by a 2016 law, the CJIP allows companies suspected of corruption, influence peddling or tax evasion to escape criminal prosecution by paying a fine.
In recent years, heavyweights such as Airbus (2.1 billion euros in 2020), Google (500 million euros in 2021) or McDonald’s (1.25 billion in June 2022) have thus gone to the fund to put an end to investigations judicial.
The CJIPs allow the State to ensure that public finances cover a very significant part of the alleged fraud, argued Gabriel Attal, questioned by the Communist senator Eric Bocquet during a debate in the Senate on the fight against tax fraud and evasion.
I always wonder where is the public interest in this device, had wondered a few minutes earlier the elected representative of the North.
The fines recovered do not represent the totality of the sums evaded and this method of negotiation suggests to ordinary mortals that the tax law does not apply in the same way depending on whether you are powerful or miserable, argued Eric Bocquet.
When you enter into a legal battle, we sometimes fight against large companies which have a legal weapon and (…) can make things last, replied Gabriel Attal.
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The succession of hearings and appeals can also end up lowering the amount that we ultimately manage to recover, he added.
By making it possible to recover money, what is more quickly, the CJIP is therefore a useful tool in several respects, concluded the Minister of Public Accounts.
At the end of October, an information mission from the Senate generally went in the same direction, emphasizing that in the face of the saturation of justice, it was necessary to support the deployment of the CJIPs.