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France backs global minimum tax on billionaires at G20
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on February 28, 2024
2 min readLast updated: January 30, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on February 28, 2024
2 min readLast updated: January 30, 2026
PARIS (Reuters) – France wants a new push for a global minimum tax on the super-rich, building on the success of a 15% minimum on multinationals taking effect this year, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Wednesday.
PARIS (Reuters) – France wants a new push for a global minimum tax on the super-rich, building on the success of a 15% minimum on multinationals taking effect this year, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Wednesday.
“Currently the richest people can avoid paying the same level of tax as other people who are less rich. We want to avoid such tax optimisation,” Le Maire said on the sidelines of meetings with G20 counterparts in Sao Paulo.
A study in October from the EU Tax Observatory, a research group, said that a global minimum tax on billionaires could raise $250 billion annually, equivalent to 2% of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth owned by 2,700 billionaires globally.
Currently, billionaires’ effective personal tax is often far less than what other taxpayers of more modest means pay because they can register assets in shell companies protecting them from income tax, the group said.
“We want Europe to take this idea of minimum taxation of individuals forward as quickly as possible, and France will be at the forefront,” Le Maire said.
He said it only made sense to crack down on tax optimisation by the super-wealthy at the international level in line with what has been achieved with the global minimum corporate tax.
More than 140 countries have so far backed a 2021 agreement to apply a corporate income tax of at least 15% from this year to discourage multinational groups from shopping around for countries with the lowest taxes.
Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said ahead of the meeting in Sao Paulo that Brazil would use its G20 presidency to initiate discussions on international measures to discourage the super-rich from using tax havens.
(Reporting by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
A global minimum tax is a tax rate set by countries to ensure that multinational corporations and wealthy individuals pay a minimum level of tax, preventing tax avoidance through offshore accounts.
Tax optimization refers to strategies used by individuals or companies to minimize their tax liabilities through legal means, such as deductions, credits, and other tax-efficient practices.
A multinational corporation is a company that operates in multiple countries, managing production or delivering services in more than one nation, often to take advantage of different economic conditions.
Effective personal tax is the actual rate of tax an individual pays on their income after accounting for deductions, credits, and other tax benefits, often lower for wealthy individuals due to various strategies.
Tax evasion is the illegal practice of not paying taxes owed by underreporting income, inflating deductions, or hiding money in offshore accounts, which can lead to severe penalties.
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