France's Secret Investigation into Systematic Jewish Tax Evasion of 2016-2017

In December 2017 it was revealed by ‘Globes’ – the main Israeli financial news site - that the French Tax Administration had set up a ‘secret department’ to investigate jews attempting to avoid paying tax in France by ‘investing’ in property in Israel.

I cannot do much better than to excerpt the ‘Times of Israel’ describing the situation.

To wit:

‘The report claims that the department was founded over the last year, has 20 Hebrew-speaking employees, and is in the process of hiring five more. Many are experts in the field of taxes and Israeli law. They pore over Israeli Land Registry contracts in an effort to find French Jews who purchased property in Israel without declaring these assets in France, according to the report.’

‘In the case of Israel, Amolis is referring to a 2008 law that offers new immigrants and returning immigrants to Israel a ten-year exemption from taxes and any reporting requirement on their income abroad. Ostensibly a law to encourage aliyah, or immigration to Israel, critics claim it signaled to would-be tax evaders and criminals that Israel is a good place to launder their money.

“The idea was to encourage aliyah to Israel of wealthy people by turning Israel into a tax haven,” Bar-Ilan University economist Avichai Snir told The Times of Israel in February. “The new law definitely gave a nudge and a wink to people who had dirty money and wanted to launder it.”

According to the Globes article, the new department in the French Tax Administration has begun looking at Land Registry documents from Israeli cities like Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ra’anana, Netanya, and Jerusalem where French people tend to purchase property. Investigators then look for foreign passport details on a property deal.’

‘According to the Globes article, the French tax authority frequently contacts its Israeli counterpart for information about French citizens living in Israel but the Israeli Tax Authority frequently rejects these requests.’

‘In the course of its reporting on binary options fraud, The Times of Israel learned that a group of several hundred serial fraudsters from France have made Israel their home and use Israel as a base to carry out Internet fraud, from carbon-VAT fraud, to CEO fraud, to forex and binary options, diamond investment fraud, and more recently, cryptocurrency fraud.

These professional con artists advertise intensively to young French-speaking immigrants who work for them as a job of last resort or a way to earn more than they could doing legitimate work. Israel has been lax in cracking down on these call centers, despite the fact the Paris prosecutor said last year that French citizens had lost 4.5 billion euros to such fraudsters, many operating from Israel, since 2010.’ (1)

So to summarise this; the French Tax Administration hired twenty tax investigators who were fluent in modern Hebrew in 2016 and tried to hire five more in 2017. The reason for these actions is because jews in France decided to try to avoid paying taxes in France by moving their money to Israel where the French authorities have little to no oversight and also a significant language barrier, while taking advantage of a 2008 Israeli law that allows them to make ‘financial aliyah’ but still reside in the Diaspora.

The Israeli authorities however have largely refused to cooperate with their French counterparts – and one rather suspects if the boot was on the other foot then the Israeli government would be screeching about ‘French anti-Semitism’ – despite the fact that – as the ‘Times of Israel’ notes – that hundreds of jewish fraudsters from France are now using Israel as their base to commit a breathtakingly wide range of white collar crimes primarily targeting the Francophone world.

You’d have thought that the Israeli government would step up to the plate to assist the French government in shutting down these criminals, but it isn’t remotely interested in doing that. Instead it – and the Israeli media as well as that of the jewish Diaspora – claimed that this is part of an ‘anti-Semitic plot’ that was ‘targeting the jews’ and is ‘reminiscent of the policies of the Third Reich’. (2)

This is – of course – utter drivel because all the French Tax Administration was – and presumably still is - doing is taking action to make sure that a specific segment of the population of France – the country’s jewish community - doesn’t try to avoid paying the taxes it owes and thus forces the rest of the country (i.e., the French people) to have to pay extra to make up the deficit in the French government’s exchequer.

The reasons that the Israeli government was – and is - so desperate to keep the money flowing into the Israeli economy by any means possible that it would overlook manifest criminality in doing so are three fold.

First is the fact that those committing the crimes are jews and are thus privileged in Israel’s eyes, because under the Israeli Law of Return. Nearly every single jew – practicing or otherwise – is automatically a citizen of Israel and thus Israel has an obligation to its ‘citizens’ by protecting their interests from other countries.

Second is the fact that the Israeli economy quite frankly needs the investment – as despite the frequent and loud claims to the contrary – as it is facing large structural problems and an ever-increasing welfare burden caused largely by the ever expanding and largely unproductive as well as extremely parasitic ultra-Orthodox jewish population. (3)

Third is the fact that the Israeli government and its business culture – in particular the construction and property markets – (4) is extremely corrupt as is proved by the ‘Holyland Apartments Affair’ – which caused then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign from office in 2009 and subsequently gaoled in 2015 – (5) as well as the 2017 fall of governing political coalition chairman David Bitan following charges of corruption relating to the Israeli property market. (6) Oh and long-time (from 1988 to 2023) Israeli minister Aryeh Deri pled guilty to engaging in a separate but similar spate of corrupt property-related deals and taking bribes in January 2022. (7)

Therefore we cannot but conclude that the French Tax Administration both did nothing wrong and was actually being diligent about tracking down tax evaders – which just so happens to be rife among the jews resident in France – while the Israeli government is aiding and abetting jewish white collar criminals targeting the Francophone world and likely taking financial kickbacks from these same criminals to protect them from the French authorities ‘for the good of the jewish people’.

References

(1) https://www.timesofisrael.com/french-tax-administration-has-secret-department-devoted-to-jews-report/ ; also see http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/France-sets-up-tax-dept-to-investigate-Jews-521379

(2) https://www.timesofisrael.com/french-tax-administration-has-secret-department-devoted-to-jews-report/ ; http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/France-sets-up-tax-dept-to-investigate-Jews-521379 ; https://forward.com/fast-forward/391178/france-denies-it-has-secret-tax-department-investigating-jews/

(3) For example: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-1.612431 ; https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21722037-dazzling-high-tech-firms-divert-attention-serious-productivity-problem-israels ; https://www.rt.com/business/390047-israel-economy-threat-research/ ; http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Israels-economy-Reasons-to-be-cheerful-and-some-for-concern-452550 ; https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4760148,00.html

(4) See for example: https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-deeper-political-agenda-behind-israels-soaring-housing-market/ ; https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4760148,00.html

(5) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/31/ehud-olmert-guilty-corruption-israel-court

(6) https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.830186

(7) https://www.timesofisrael.com/suspicions-against-interior-minister-piling-up-report/; https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-694482