In its recent powerful investigation into the exploitation of Haiti by France in the colonial past, The New York Times highlighted the predatory role played by the bank Crédit Industriel et Commercial. In fact, reports Laurent Mauduit, all French colonial banks practiced this same pillaging system of exploitation in Asia, Africa and the Antilles.
While wealth-managing firms in the Swiss city close to the French border say that it is to support the local economy that they encourage employees to live locally instead of in cheaper France, banking secrecy concerns are also behind the policy.
A government financial watchdog has announced the top six banks in France must from July limit their exposure to indebted companies at five percent of their capital, in a move aimed at slowing what has become record-level borrowing by French businesses
Top French banks have said that after Britain's departure from the European Union a total of 1,000 jobs will be created by moving part of their current operations in London to Paris.
Beginning in 2013, representatives of the United States, the European Union on behalf of its 28 member states, along with more than 20 other countries have been regularly meeting in Geneva to secretly negotiate a future treaty for the liberalization of the international services market, called the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). By far the largest single sector of this market is that of financial services, which the treaty plans to deregulate on despite all the evidence provided by the global financial crisis of the folly of such a move. The details of the treaty have until now been kept secret from public scrutiny, but for the recent revelation by WikiLeaks of the draft text of the treaty’s Financial Services Annex. To understand the full implications of the opaque dealings in Geneva, Martine Orange turned to Dominique Plihon, a former advisor to the French government on economic issues, alter-globalization militant and a professor with Paris-XIII university specialized in the financial economy.
Earlier this month it was revealed that French tycoon Bernard Arnault, chief executive of luxury goods firm LVMH, the wealthiest person in France and the fourth wealthiest worldwide, has applied for dual Belgian nationality. The French conservative opposition was quick to cite it as an example of the flight of capital that will follow higher taxes the government is to impose on the country’s top income earners, while President François Hollande decried Arnault's lack of patriotism. Mediapart Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel sets out here how tax evasion has become a colossal and insitutionalised business at the centre of the economy. Fighting it has never been more urgent, yet little effort - if any - is being made to prevent it or to sanction those who are bleeding society of vital resources.
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