The French Minister of Finance, Bruno Le Maire, denounced Thursday a "provocation" on the part of the United States, which announced by letter their desire to "not continue" the negotiations at the OECD on the taxation of the giants of the digital. "I confirm that we have received, with my Italian, Spanish and British counterparts, a letter from the Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin who confirms that they do not want to continue the negotiations at the OECD on digital taxation", he said. he asserted on France Inter.
"We were a few inches from an agreement"
"This letter is a provocation," he lamented, assuring that France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain had already replied to the United States to confirm in a letter their will to obtain "fair digital taxation at the OECD as quickly as possible". "We were a few inches from an agreement on the taxation of digital giants, who are perhaps the only ones in the world to have profited from the coronavirus," said Le Maire, who also outraged at the way France was treated.
"What is it like this way of treating the allies of the United States (...) by systematically threatening us with punishment", he denounced, assuring that his country would not renounce the tax, which he began to collect in 2019. "We will apply whatever happens to digital giants in 2020 because it is a question of justice", he assured, recalling that the French tax "had never been withdrawn, but simply suspended for a few months".
Taxation applied regardless of the position of the United States
France had taken the decision in January to postpone until the end of the year the levy of this tax for the year 2020 to give time for negotiations at the OECD to succeed. At the end of January, 137 countries had indeed agreed to reach by the end of 2020 an agreement on the taxation of multinationals, under the aegis of the OECD. "Either the United States goes back on its position and we reach an agreement by the end of 2020 and it is international taxation that will apply (...), or there is no agree to the OECD because the United States is the only country to block, in this case we will apply our national tax ", reiterated Bruno Le Maire.
Faced with the French will to tax the digital giants, the Trump administration had threatened to overtax "up to 100%" the equivalent of $ 2.4 billion in French products.