Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

France Shouldn't Let Google Get Off Tax-Free

It may be impossible to claim much in back taxes from the search giant, but new rules should stop tax avoidance.

July 13, 2017 at 12:49 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Better laws will make for better corporate citizens.
Photographer: JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

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After Google settled for just 130 million pounds ($168 million) in back taxes with the U.K. last year, the French government swore it would get more money out of the search giant -- based, as then-Finance Minister Michel Sapin said, not on negotiation but on application of the law. On Wednesday, that approach failed spectacularly.

A Paris court rejected the government's demand that Google pay 1.115 billion euros ($1.28 billion) in taxes for 2005 through 2010. The failure shows that countries and blocs like the European Union need urgently to change their tax rules as they are too easily flouted by multinationals. In the meantime, old debts will have to be negotiated or forgotten.