Finance Minister Fernando Haddad told his counterparts at a G20 meeting on Wednesday that “there are no winners” in the current “globalization crisis,” and called for more taxation of those he called the “super-rich.”
“We have reached an unsustainable situation, where the richest 1 percent own 43 percent of the world’s financial assets and emit the same amount of carbon as the poorest two-thirds of humanity,” Mr. Haddad told a gathering of finance ministers in São Paulo via video conference.
“As hyper-financialization proceeded at a fast pace, a complex offshore system was structured to provide the super-rich with increasingly elaborate forms of tax evasion,” he added. Such trends, he argued, culminated in the 2008 financial crisis.
“Recognizing the progress made in the last decade, we must admit that we still need to make the world’s billionaires pay their fair share in taxes,” Mr. Haddad added.
Mr. Haddad and the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration have recently succeeded in enacting policies to tax the super-rich in Brazil.
In late 2023, President Lula da Silva signed into law a bill to tax offshore investments and investment funds used by the super-rich. Last week, the government limited exclusive pension funds for super-rich families to up to BRL 5 million (USD 1 million) in individual balances, a tool to prevent tax avoidance from offshore investments migrating to such pension funds.
National Treasury Secretary Rogério Ceron said earlier this month that revenues from investment funds are “coming in strong”. Federal revenues reached a record BRL 280.6 billion (USD 56.5 billion) in January, up 6.6 percent in real terms compared to a year earlier. About BRL 4 billion came from income tax on capital gains, mostly from exclusive funds.
In October, the European Union-funded Tax Observatory called for a 2 percent levy on the wealth of the world’s 2,700 billionaires, which would raise at least USD 214 billion per year. Mr. Haddad did not refer to this proposal, but called for G20 countries to “advance ongoing negotiations at the OECD and the United Nations”.
Search
