(Paris) The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire expressed Tuesday his “indignation” regarding the suspicion of tax evasion operations of several large French fortunes via trusts in Canada.
“I share your indignation on the question underlined by the ISF and on the litigation that we have with the Canadian trusts”, declared Bruno Le Maire in response to a question from the LFI deputy François Ruffin during a hearing before the commission of Economic affairs of the National Assembly.
“We have launched all the procedures for several years to obtain information from the Canadian authorities”, he added, assuring that the French government was “mobilized” to fight against “fraud or against tax evasion “.
For several years, French justice has been investigating suspicions of tax evasion by large French fortunes who allegedly used trusts, opaque asset location structures, to avoid paying wealth tax in France.
Last May, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office had thus confirmed to AFP that the brothers Jérôme and Nicolas Seydoux, rich industrialists in French cinema, were cited in a judicial investigation opened in 2019 in connection with the existence of trusts in Canada.
Blue Bridge, from Montreal
Monday, the Parisian newspaper Release published a vast investigation into this affair, at the center of which would be the Quebec wealth management company Blue Bridge, which allegedly used a loophole in the Franco-Canadian tax treaty of 1975.
This “subjects the income of trusts to tax, (but) nothing is clearly said about the sums coming from the capital itself”, explains Liberation.
In addition to the Seydoux family, other people, such as the founders of Promodès, Richard cafes or Nobilis upholstery fabrics, would have had recourse to Blue Bridge, according to the daily.
Since 2011, French law obliges French residents to declare their trusts to the French authorities and sometimes to pay taxes in connection with these trusts and for French people living abroad to declare them if they contain property located in France.