Nearly 29 billion euros last year, more than 27 billion this year. Three times more than before Covid-19. Since the health crisis, share buybacks have reached historic amounts in France, as elsewhere in Europe. Figures that are difficult to pass politically in a context of tensions on purchasing power.
Wednesday March 22, during a television interview on TF1 and France 2, Emmanuel Macron pointed out the « cynicism » of « these large companies that we have helped” during the crisis, saying they want “to work on an exceptional contribution, so that this money, when there are exceptional profits from companies ready to buy back their own shares, their workers can benefit from it”.
However, there is no question of taxing superprofits: the objective remains to encourage companies to better remunerate their employees via existing value-sharing mechanisms. Emmanuel Macron also reaffirmed, on Wednesday, his desire to continue the policy of supply (pro-business), his economic common thread since 2017. This Who “supposes assuming the tax choices we have made for companies: if we want to continue to reindustrialise, we need more work, and more capital”he repeated.
Only companies with more than 5,000 employees practicing share buybacks would be affected by this contribution, Bruno Le Maire then clarified before the senators. « We want to force them to distribute more profit-sharing, more participation, more tax-free bonuses when they buy back sharesdetailed the Minister of the Economy. For example, we could consider doubling the sums paid » in this capacity. According to INSEE, there were 273 companies with more than 5,000 employees in France in 2020, employing 3.9 million people.
“Third stage” of a better distribution of value
The executive intends to let the social partners decide what this incentive should be, ” third step “of a better distribution of value, according to Bruno Le Maire, after a first series of measures since 2017 – simplification of profit-sharing and participation agreements, abolition of the social package and tripling of the “Macron bonus” – the second consisting of the levy on energy companies decided in the fall of 2022 to finance aid in the face of the energy crisis.
“If it can come into force in 2023, that’s great”, we say to Bercy, without being able to list the number of companies concerned, the sums at stake, or to say whether this measure would appear in the “labor” law, or a hypothetical text on the sharing of the value. The 2024 budget would also be a possible vehicle.
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