François Hollande deep in tax haven merde

François Hollande, French president, was a hero for a time last year for the gullible until his proposed growth pact was revealed to be just a political slogan. He also fired up supporters with plans to tax the rich until the pips squeak and become the scourge of tax havens. However, in the past two weeks, the already unpopular president has found himself to be deep in tax haven merde.

France24 says  Jérôme Cahuzac, who resigned as Hollande's budget minister, which included the job of countering tax cheats, once compared having a Swiss bank account with taking a pregnancy test. “It’s either there or it’s not - - there’s no in between,” he told a reporter from French daily Libération in February. “Do you think I’d still be in office if there was the slightest chance I had one?”

Two months later, Cahuzac’s carefully concealed “pregnancy”, or €600,000 offshore bank account, has come out screaming. Described by the French press as “one of the most spectacular scandals” the country has seen for decades, Cahuzac’s admission of guilt - - after four months of public denial - - has left the nation dumbfounded, and his Socialist Party colleagues devastated.

The news channel says Cahuzac was deemed a tough-talking, earnest politician who prided himself on honesty. His staggering fall from grace has got everybody in France wondering, who is the Socialist minister who duped the nation?

Then on Thursday reports of a massive leak of tax haven data identified Jean-Jacques Augier, President Hollande's campaign co-treasurer and close friend, as having an interest in a Cayman Island's company.

An anonymous source has provided the opportunity for the greatest insight into a worldwide network of tax evaders. Media in more than 30 countries are currently trawling through loads of data.

It is reported that 260 gigabytes of documents - - equivalent to 500,000 printed copies of the Bible, has been made available to the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) in Washington. More than 2m emails and other confidential documents, implicate more than 130,000 people from 170 countries, who are alleged to have secreted their money in tax havens.

British Virgin Islands is the main tax haven in the trove of data - - known in shorthand as the BVI. It has a population of 28,000 and 500,000 active offshore companies. That represents about 40% of the offshore companies that exist around the globe, according to a 2011 World Bank report

An already weak President Hollande has taken a back seat in Europe to avoid brickbats.

After the second round of the National Assembly elections last June, he was offered a few EIB (European Investment Bank) funded projects to meet his demands for a growth pact and that was that. However, it would have been useful to have had a detailed plan that he could have used to rally support from other countries. He had nothing.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has no countervailing power to worry about.

François Hollande deep in tax haven merde