In a ruling by the Versailles court of appeal on Friday, French bank Société Générale was found to have been in large part responsible for the 4.9 billion euros in losses attributed to the reckless trades of its so-called “rogue trader” Jérôme Kerviel in 2008. The court ruling concerned Kerviel’s appeal against the damages he was required to pay the bank, which until now was fixed as the entire sum of the losses, and which it reduced to 1 million euros. Mediapart economics and finance correspondent Martine Orange analyses here the many consequences of the ruling, not least of which is the demand that the bank now pay back a 2.2-billion-euro tax break it was granted as a result of the sums lost.
The French government’s proposed top 75% income tax rate, applicable to individuals annually earning more than 1 million euros, was struck down by the country’s Constitutional Council last weekend after it ruled that it breached a fundamental principle of equality for taxpayers. This was the application of income tax per individual instead of the usual method of per household. How could the government, now accused of amateurism, and especially the budget and finance ministries, have ignored a technicality to which they had been previously alerted by the parliamentary finance commission? While President François Hollande has promised to redraft the terms of the tax, there is every indication that, if it is revived, it will return severely watered-down. Mediapart business and finance specialist Martine Orange analyses a fiasco that begs the question of whether the tax was scuppered from the inside.
