There will be a surcharge of between 3pc and 9pc on corporate profits for businesses with more than €1bn (£840m) in revenues, a tax on share buy-backs, and an extra tax levied on individuals making more than €250,000 or couples making more than €500,000, all of which should bring in a few extra billion to help balance the books.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Barnier’s precarious government can muster up enough votes to pass the budget. It could well fall at any moment.
And yet the important point is this. The bankers who fled London for Paris to escape Brexit have been completely betrayed.
A €250,000 salary may sound like a lot to most of us, and out in provincial France, it may suggest a trip to the guillotine is in order, but on the trading floor of JP Morgan, or among the wizards who design the investment strategies of some of the major hedge funds, it is hardly a huge sum of money.
If that was the bonus, they would probably regard it as a bad year.
Meanwhile, France’s financial paper Les Echos reports that some of the global banks located in Paris may well be caught up in the corporation tax surcharge, while many individual employees will be paying more personally as well.
It quotes many of the Wall Street banks in particular as “horrified” by the planned tax rises, with plans for further expansion now indefinitely on hold. Whatever way you care to look at it, the finance industry has been badly let down by the French government.
With the state forced to raise a lot more money, it turns out that the bankers and hedge fund managers are easy prey.
Sure, the promise is that the tax rise will only be “temporary”, but given the amount that has been collected to balance the books no one really believes that. Over the next few years, the financiers will be forced to pay a lot more to fund France’s lavishly generous pensions and public spending that is already among the highest in the world. It is hardly what they bargained on.