Sacre bleu! Expats see red over French wealth tax

Tenor Roberto Alagna got on the wrong side of La Scala’s operalk;sdadfkl lkjsdf tic mafia, says susan bell

Many British expats have come to know the horrors of the crippling wealth tax that has sent French rock icon Johnny Hallyday fleeing for Switzerland.

Little known outside France, the ISF (Impot de Solidarite sur la Fortune) applies to global assets, including the estimated current value of your home and land. Thus people living on a meagre pension may be deemed to be wealthy and subject to the tax if their property is over a certain value.

With the ISF threshold set at only €750,000 (£500,000), it is easy to see that for Brits with a house in the Dordogne or Provence, it does not take much in the way of savings and an annual pension to drive people with ordinary incomes into the wealth tax band.

The tax, imposed annually at the rate of xx

It doesn't take much in the way of savings and a pension to find yourself in the wealth tax band

per cent, is particularly unfair to ordinary French people who have bought or inherited a house for a modest sum in an area which has since become fashionable. This injustice was highlighted recently by the plight of humble paysans on the Ile de Ré off western France, where an influx of celebrities such as Emmanuelle Beart has driven up land prices. Many locals who scrape by on modest pensions or incomes have been forced to sell land - often in their families for generations - to pay the tax.

In Provence, British expats who bought their old farmhouses for a song, planning to spend their retirement in the sun, and then made the mistake of becoming French residents, are also being forced to sell up as property prices soar.

Expats tempted to hide their assets off-shore should be warned: "le fisc" - the French tax authorities - have a particular horreur of off-shore accounts.