The government wants to take a 33% contribution on the profits of more than 20% on average for the previous four years of energy companies. The result will be “relatively anecdotal”, estimates Maxime Combes, economist specialist of the multinationals and member of Attac. Guest of franceinfo this Tuesday, October 11, he recommends directly taxing the “turnover” multinationals.
You start a study to find out how much TotalEnergies will pay with this tax on superprofits. So you don’t have a figure yet, but according to you, it will be quite low. Why ?
TotalEnergies manages to localize extremely few of its profits in France. Based on the databases published by TotalEnergies, we are able to prove that when the group makes losses, they are mainly located in France. On the other hand, when TotalEnergies makes profits, they are essentially located abroad. While we find in France 30% of its employees and even its head office. It’s a coping system to have very little tax to pay on its profits in normal times. The government’s proposal only aims to tax the superprofits made on its soil, the result will be relatively anecdotal.
So why did the boss of TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanné, say he was against this government device, but for a discount at the pump as he is already doing now?
Most CEOs of large multinationals want the state or public authorities to support them during hard times such as the pandemic or in the event of investment in new technologies of the future. On the other hand, they refuse any intervention of these same public authorities when it is a question of touching the increase in their profits. It is an ideological posture. It consists in saying that as long as a company makes a lot of profits, this should make it possible to remunerate the shareholders and possibly to invest and then as a last resort to increase the employees of the company. And you should know that we count the superprofits of TotalEnergies in tens of billions of euros in 2022.
The government defends its measure by saying that it is a transposition of a European directive. Is doing this at European level a good thing in your opinion?
Having measures on a European scale is a very good thing in general. The problem is that this device aims more to extinguish the criticism or the anger of the European social body than to recover extremely substantial funding. However, this is not a fatality. If you tax on profits, as will be the case on those made by TotalEnergies in France, in the end, you tax very little. On the other hand, if you tax on the turnover that the multinational realizes in a given territory: it is much less manipulable and you tax more.