On Wednesday October 12, 227 deputies voted in favor of an amendment aimed at taxing “super-dividends” more, but the government announced on Monday, through the voice of its Minister of the Economy, that the latter would not would not be retained in the final text of the budget. Proposed by the MoDem and supported by the deputies of the National Rally, of La France insoumise, and even by certain elected Macronists, the amendment aimed, according to the words of the MoDem deputy Jean-Paul Mattei, to establish “a flat-tax at 35 % for the super-dividends distributed which would correspond to more than 20% of the average of the last five years of dividend distribution”. The stated aim being that, instead of distributing large dividends, the largely profitable companies invest. The increase in taxation by 5% compared to what it is currently constituting, for the Renaissance deputy Benoît Bordat, “a measure of social justice”.
But the government, opposed to the idea, does not intend to ratify the choice of the Assembly. This Monday, on BFM TV, Bruno Le Maire was very hostile to the project, denouncing this tendency to always want to overtax “super-dividends and super-profits”, so many formulas that they qualify as “hoax”. On August 30, during the Meeting of French Entrepreneurs, the Minister of the Economy declared that he “did not know what a super-profit was”, and repeated that “taxing more meant producing less “. This Monday, he therefore continued in this direction, believing that “if France managed to get out of this idea that it will be better by increasing its level of tax, it will have made great progress”.
More specifically, the Minister considers that this implementation would penalize the French, “the amendment only applying to distributions made to natural persons domiciled in France and not to those domiciled abroad”. However, 40% of CAC 40 companies are owned by foreign investors. Moreover, according to the government, most of the large fortunes would not be concerned, their securities being held by holding companies, that is to say companies which hold shares in several other companies. “I do not see why we would increase the tax of the employee who has shares and that we would not increase the tax of the holding company or the investment fund which has exactly the same shares and which will resell them”, declared Bruno Le Maire.
Finally, the government finds it “unfair” that companies which have not paid dividends during the Covid crisis find themselves penalized, since the method of calculation envisaged would tax those which have paid, this year, dividends higher by 20% to those distributed between 2017 and 2021.
