PARIS: France’s wealthiest entrepreneurs hold around €17bn in neighbouring Belgium where taxes are lower, according to a French newspaper report.
While some have had Belgian bases for many years, a wave of fiscal exiles have gone north since François Hollande became president in 2012, the financial paper L’Echo claimed.
Its lists of exiles includes Bernard Arnault, head of the luxury goods group LVMH and France’s richest man; media mogul Stéphane Courbit; businessman and former government minister Bernard Tapie; and the Mulliez family, which controls the supermarket chain Auchan.
L’Echo also listed the Bongrain family, head of France’s second biggest cheese company, which set up a holding company in Brussels in 1988; the Besnier family, founders of the milk product company Lactalis, based at Ixelles; and the Savare family, whose Oberthur Technologies group is a world leader in secure printing.
The youngest son of the Decaux publicity family also has a holding company in Belgium, according to the paper, as does the Hériard-Dubreuil family, which made its fortune in spirits.
L’Echo claimed that almost 20 of France’s richest 100 people had invested part of their wealth in Belgium. When it extended its research to the top 500, it discovered that many more were either living in or setting up holding companies in Belgium, involving assets and investments worth €17bn.
Of course, nobody every talks about tax evasion or even exile. No, in the discretion of the chambers of the biggest tax lawyers, they talk more of optimisation. And they are not wrong,” L’Echo said.
It said those concerned were “not shouting it from the rooftops” but “sheltering their holdings behind increasingly improbably names”.
