France pledges tax cuts in bid to win Brexit jobs race

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced new tax initiatives to attract bankers and traders as the race to win Brexit jobs heats up

France will suppress the highest bracket of a payroll tax paid by banks and other financial companies and scrap a levy on intraday trading, Mr Philippe said Friday (Bloomberg)

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe used a rooftop presentation with a sweeping view over Paris to announce new tax initiatives to attract bankers and traders as the race to win Brexit jobs heats up.

France will suppress the highest bracket of a payroll tax paid by banks and other financial companies and scrap a levy on intraday trading, Mr Philippe said Friday, speaking from the roof of the Paris mint. His government also proposes to exclude variable pay from the calculation of damages for traders who are laid off, he said.

“Promoting the financial attractiveness of Paris means promoting France’s economic development,” Mr Philippe said. “Each financier, each banker, each trader coming to settle in Paris will help create other jobs.”

Paris is competing with cities include Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Madrid and Dublin for jobs that may shift to continental Europe as Britain prepares to leave the European Union. London has flourished as a hub for global finance in part because firms based in the capital have the right to do business across the 28-nation EU. When the UK quits the bloc, British banks as well as London-based firms from the US, Japan and other non-EU countries stand to lose this “passport” and may need to channel their business through units based in the bloc.

Deutsche Bank is preparing to move large parts of the trading and investment-banking assets it currently books in London to its hometown of Frankfurt in response to Brexit, people familiar with the matter say. Standard Chartered and Nomura are among other firms that have picked the city as their EU hub in recent weeks. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are weighing a similar move.

Emmanuel Macron, 39, became France’s president in May, defeating the anti-euro, anti-immigration Marine Le Pen, on a pro-business reform platform. Mr Philippe repeated the government’s plans to cut France’s corporate tax rate “by steps” to 25 per cent by 2022 from 33 pe rcent, trim the wealth tax by 2019 at the latest and create a 30 per cent flat rate on capital revenues.

Bloomberg