Dubai Papers: tax fraud judged for what it is, a turnkey service

According to Le Monde Économie, the trial known as the "Dubai Papers" opens on Monday in Paris. Nine executives of the firm Hélin International, three lawyers and a French chartered accountant are on trial. They are accused of having, over several years, methodically helped more than 300 French taxpayers defraud the tax authorities through sophisticated schemes. The paper quotes the phrase "large-scale tax-fraud boutique". The defendants are presumed innocent until judgment, and the report says nothing, at this stage, about the sums involved, the penalties faced or the defence of the accused. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us first take the vocabulary: "boutique", "large-scale". This is not a description of a lapse in conduct, but of a business with its staff, its clientele and its catalogue. More than 300 clients: that is a market. Fraud here is a billable service, with the work divided between lawyers, accountants and account managers. Capital, for its part, does not need geography explained to it: it flows toward wherever it is taxed least, and there are professionals paid to chart the route.

This is where the distributive question becomes relevant. Profit, in our reading grid, springs from unpaid labour: the part of the working day that the employee gives beyond what his wage covers. Yet that surplus value is not kept entirely by those who capture it, since part of it must go back to the community in the form of tax. The offshore arrangement is an attempt to reclaim that last share. The employee, whose income tax is deducted at source, has no firm in Dubai to negotiate for him. We do not know, for lack of detail in the report, who the 300 clients are or where their wealth came from. The structure of the problem, however, is legible: tax is automatic at the bottom and optional at the top.

Common language adds its own fog. We say that "capital flees", that "taxation drives people into exile", as though natural forces were at work. These are decisions: those of clients who pay, of advisers who design, of states that tolerate, more or less long. What the trial usefully does is restore names and grammatical subjects to what we ordinarily describe in the passive voice.

There remains the question of unequal treatment, which the file does not prove on its own but invites us to examine. Years of schemes before a hearing is a long time. We will need to see what sanctions fall, whether the clients will also be prosecuted, and what the tax authority actually recovers. Convicting a few intermediaries would not solve the problem: as long as demand exists, supply will reassemble under another name. The true measure of this trial will be this: whether it punishes a boutique, or goes after the industry that makes it profitable.