THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
You have, like everyone else, around fifty million euros to evade from the tax authorities. However, you are unsure of the best way to carry out this act of self-defense. Don’t waste a minute and watch Yannick Kergoat’s popular documentary, co-written with Denis Robert (journalist who investigated the Clearstream affair, a Luxembourg clearing house), devoted to the mechanisms of tax evasion.
What a pleasure this film which, with the help of specialists speaking a clear language, and many edifying and facetious animation sequences, will detail for you the procedure to follow, less complicated than what we imagined. No doubt it is not forbidden, without a penny in savings, to watch this film, but there is obviously a risk of taking a little less pleasure from it, of even being scandalized by a practice which, far from being suppressed as we have been assured for years, only grows and embellishes as the system enriches the richest and impoverishes the others, in full view of the rulers, with the blessing of the banking establishments which participate in it and, of course, to the detriment of the common good. Small reason for satisfaction all the same: the spectator most resistant to these accounting acrobatics will come out of the film having finally understood – at least in broad outline – how it is stripped.
Once upon a time, there was the golden age of Swiss safes and sacrosanct bank secrecy, under which offenders transported, or transported themselves, their ingots and their large denominations by car or train. But, in 2008, the Swiss bankers had their arms twisted by the American Senate. Here they are forced to reveal names. It’s the end of an El Dorado. In fact, the serious things begin. Globalization and digitization will help with the appearance of the offshore company. The click replaces the Cadillac of the Corniaud. Now, with the help of well-established tax law firms and auditing firms, banks playing the game and countries putting their laws to work for traffic, the real owners of money are disappearing under a network of phantom companies and nominees created, in various countries, for this sole purpose.
State complicity
Still, nothing has been said about “tax optimization”, which in the film is the subject of a fascinating dismantling, showing how multinationals, equipped with armies of financial analysts and lawyers , use the loopholes offered by the various national legislations to evade taxation. An art in which the GAFA are past masters, with the blessing of Barack Obama, who refused to sign the international agreement which would have made it possible to fight against these practices. These juicy martingales, which have replaced hunting with hounds among the greats of this world on a sporting level, could not finally exist, at least this is the thesis of this film, without the complicity of the States which, since the G20 of 2008 , pretend to fight the principle by declarations of intent or the publication of lists of tax havens.
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