To raise nearly “three billion per year”, deputies and senators presented on Thursday a bill aimed at combating practices of fraud or tax evasion based on exchanges of securities, thus hoping to influence future arbitrations. budgetary.
Tax evasion is estimated at 100 billion per year in France, underlined LFI MP Charlotte Leduc during a conference in the Assembly, alongside Senator Nathalie Goulet (Centrist Union), who is carrying the text to the upper house.
In their sights, practices revealed in 2018 by a consortium of European media in the CumEx Files, mixing several tax schemes on dividends.
They hope to recover up to three billion euros per year. I’m not sure our budget could do without it, noted Ms. Goulet.
The so-called CumCum practice consists of avoiding taxation on dividends that holders of shares in French companies residing abroad must pay.
The latter entrust their securities to a bank in France or in a country benefiting from a favorable tax treaty at the time of collection, thus avoiding taxation.
The authors propose applying a withholding tax of 30% to all financial flows leaving abroad. The person requesting reimbursement must prove that they are the legitimate recipient, and not an intermediary.
Another aspect concerns the practice according to which several investors agree to change shares and claim the same tax withholding reimbursement several times. Bercy is then unable to determine the legitimate beneficiary.
The parliamentarians propose to make any reimbursement conditional on a control by the administration to ensure that the person had been subject to withholding tax.
Their proposals are supported by more than 70 senators, from the centrist Union, left-wing groups, Republicans, Independents and RDSE (radicals and left-wing radicals).
In the Assembly, left-wing elected officials and MP Liot Charles de Courson support the initiative. Ms. Leduc hopes to convince the right and Macronists, by maintaining that a text announced by the government for the fall against fraud does not give its place to the fight against tax fraud.
She hopes in particular to see the text on the agenda for a transpartisan week of the Assembly. Ms. Goulet raised the possibility of a niche of opposition in the Senate, or the possibility that the government itself would bring the measures to the debate.