Dubai Papers: 54 million euros in tax gone missing, 14 defendants in the dock

According to RFI, the trial of the "Dubai Papers" opens this Monday, 2 November, before the Paris criminal court (tribunal correctionnel). Fourteen people, including a Belgian prince, and three companies are in the dock. They are suspected of having organised, between 2007 and 2018, a vast system allowing wealthy French people to escape tax. At least 54 million euros is alleged to have slipped past the taxman (fisc). RFI presents the case as one of the largest tax fraud trials in recent years. The details of the mechanisms, the identity of the clients and the defence of the accused do not appear in the dispatch we have: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. The accused are presumed innocent until the judges rule, and the trial is precisely there to decide.

Let us start from a simple principle. Profit has a source: the unpaid labour of employees, what Marxist tradition calls surplus value. Wages cover the reproduction of the labour force; the rest is captured by the holders of capital. But this surplus does not stay intact. Part of it is taken by tax, which funds schools, hospitals, roads, and also the social peace that lets the whole thing keep running. To shield wealth from that levy is to keep the loot for oneself while leaving others with the bill for the infrastructure that made it possible.

That is where the scale of these 54 million becomes clear. Measured against the state budget, the sum is modest, and that is precisely the point: a minimum, RFI says, over eleven years. Meanwhile the employee has tax deducted at source, with no structures and no advisers in Dubai. For him, tax is not a matter of strategy; it is a line on the payslip. Tax law appears neutral and universal; in practice it becomes all the more optional the more you can afford lawyers, shell companies and an accommodating time zone.

The language of commentary, moreover, helps muddy the waters. We speak of "capital flight", as if money had legs, or of "optimisation", a term that smells pleasantly of yield. In truth, people decide, intermediaries design, banks and companies execute. The trial has at least the merit of putting names and responsibilities where we were talking about flows. This is what critical tradition calls fetishism: presenting very human decisions as natural movements.

One last remark. A state that prosecutes tax fraud also acts for the stability of the order it guarantees: it protects consent to taxation, and therefore its own tax base. That this consent is so unequally demanded is the real class question. An answer, at least a partial one, may emerge in the hearings to come. The rest, namely effective sanction and its relation to the harm done, remains to be seen.