Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the French Communist Party and a candidate in the presidential election, clashed with Italian billionaire Paolo Rotelli on Wednesday evening during a debate on LCI's "La Grande Confrontation" program, sparring over boardroom representation, worker pay and corporate tax avoidance.
Rotelli, 37, is a Monaco-based billionaire and heir to a hospital and clinic empire who appeared on the program wearing a diamond necklace. He put his own fortune at between 800 million and 1 billion euros, with monthly income of around 1 million euros, according to his own account.
"La Grande Confrontation" is a debate program broadcast on the French news channel LCI that regularly pits opposing political and public figures against one another.
Roussel's parity proposal
The debate gave Roussel a chance to defend one of his flagship proposals, which he calls "social parity": requiring as many factory workers and employees to sit in Parliament and on company boards as business leaders, lawyers and tax specialists. He said he wanted an obligation to field as many workers and employees for parliamentary seats as company directors, lawyers and tax lawyers, arguing it would do the country good to have more workers and employees in Parliament when budgets are decided.
He also said he wanted company boards to include as many employee representatives as shareholders, with equal voting power on decisions that affect them.
Rotelli dismissed the idea as unworkable. He said that if he let workers or doctors sit on his own board and make decisions, the company would turn into Disneyland, and that he would have gone bankrupt three or four times over thirteen years instead of tripling the company's value.
Accusations of tax avoidance
Turning to the taxation of dividends, Roussel said he regretted that the 500 wealthiest families in France had seen their fortunes double over the past decade, largely through tax optimization. He said the difference between fraud and optimization amounted to the thickness of a prison wall, and accused these families of stabbing the Republic every day.
His proposed solution is a withholding tax on multinational companies' profits, collected at source. He explained that based on wealth created in France, companies would pay tax immediately on the profits they had made in the country, before that money could be moved to Luxembourg.
An unexpected point of agreement
On this specific point, Rotelli sided with the communist candidate, telling him he was right about withholding tax on dividends. He said Italy had made it impossible to avoid the 26 percent withholding tax on dividends, adding that even as a Monaco resident, he still pays the 26 percent at source. He said he found this fair, because when a company produces in a country, it should pay its taxes in that country.
