Economist Gabriel Zucman Accuses TotalEnergies of Shifting Profits Abroad, Company Fires Back

French economist Gabriel Zucman is putting TotalEnergies on the spot, accusing the oil-and-gas giant of moving profits across borders to cut its tax bill, an allegation the company flatly rejects.

The clash, amplified on French business network BFM TV, has reignited a familiar fight in France: whether multinational corporations are paying what the public sees as their “fair share,” and why it’s so hard to match up headline profits with the taxes companies actually pay.

TotalEnergies says the charge doesn’t hold up. Its business is global by design, the company argues, and its profits show up where the work happens, not where taxes are lowest.

A fight over the math, and what “profit” even means

At the center of the dispute is methodology. Critics often lean on big-picture, aggregated data, consolidated financial statements and international statistics, to estimate where value is created and where taxes should be paid.

Companies counter with the rules they’re required to follow: accounting standards, transfer-pricing regulations, and the real-world distribution of operations, investment, and risk. The gap between the two sides can come down less to a single number than to definitions, what counts as “local” profit, and where legal tax planning ends and abuse begins.

TotalEnergies: Our footprint is real, and we disclose taxes by country

TotalEnergies says it isn’t artificially parking profits in low-tax jurisdictions. The company points to the on-the-ground reality of its operations, extraction, trading, refining, chemicals, and retail fuel sales, spread across multiple countries.

It also highlights transparency measures, including country-by-country reporting and disclosures of taxes paid in the places where it operates. In the company’s telling, the geographic pattern of profits mirrors the geographic pattern of business activity.

Why this argument is so politically charged in France

The dispute lands in a tense political moment. After energy prices surged and major players posted strong results, calls grew louder for windfall taxes, tougher enforcement against tax avoidance, and stricter conditions on public support.

France’s biggest blue-chip companies, many of them in the CAC 40 index, roughly comparable to a mix of the Dow and the S&P 100 in visibility, are routinely pressed to justify their tax contributions. But cross-country comparisons get messy fast in oil and gas, where producer nations often impose specialized levies, royalties, and production-sharing arrangements that don’t look like a standard corporate income tax.

What critics say can shift the taxable base

Critics of multinationals often focus on mechanisms that can move taxable income around the map: where trading desks are located, how subsidiaries finance each other, who owns intellectual property, and how margins are allocated along the value chain.

In energy, there’s an added wrinkle. Producer countries frequently charge sector-specific taxes and royalties that can be heavier than a typical corporate income tax. That means comparing taxes paid in France to worldwide profits can mislead if it lumps together very different categories, income taxes, production taxes, excise duties, value-added tax collected, and other industry contributions.

The bigger backdrop: the global minimum tax, and the limits of enforcement

The Zucman-TotalEnergies exchange also reflects a broader shift in international tax policy. The OECD and G20-backed global minimum tax was designed to reduce the incentive to book profits in low-tax jurisdictions.

But implementation is technical and uneven, with exemptions, thresholds, and phased timelines. Companies still have room to structure operations and accounting within the rules, fueling a transition period where demands for transparency are rising faster than the public’s ability to decode what the numbers mean.

What’s at stake now

For TotalEnergies, the immediate goal is protecting its reputation, and its relationships with regulators, investors, and customers. For Zucman, a prominent scholar known internationally for research on tax havens and wealth concentration, the aim is to keep pressure on multinationals and push the debate toward reform, including stronger minimum-tax regimes.

For everyone else, the problem remains stubbornly practical: getting comparable, verifiable, properly contextualized information that can separate aggressive tax avoidance from a legitimately global business.

https://www.europe-infos.fr/business/9029/comment-gerer-la-saisonnalite-de-son-activite-sans-mettre-sa-tresorerie-en-danger/