Gabriel Zucman

And so that was the idea at the G20.

It was to put on the table, on the agenda of the G20, an idea that all countries could support and everybody in our economies could support.

That's very important.

What's really important to understand is that tax avoidance is not a kind of law of nature.

It's man-made, right?

So we write in the laws, we introduce possibilities for the very rich to avoid taxes.

And so if we want to prevent tax avoidance, we just need to write the law differently.

We just need to write it very simply and to say, if you're extremely rich, you have more than 100 million pounds in wealth,

No matter what, you have to pay an unavoidable minimum of personal tax equal to 2% of your wealth, period.

If you write the law like that, it's going to be really hard to avoid the tax.

Why?

Because the wealth of these individuals is, in fact, quite simple.

More than 90% of it corresponds to shares in companies.

And about half is shares in publicly listed corporations, very easy to value, to observe.

And the rest is shares in big private companies, not listed on the stock market.

But by definition, because we are talking about very rich people, these are going to be very large private companies.

And we know how to value them because there's a whole –

financial industry that does that, you look at how similar companies that are listed on the stock market are valued by the stock market.

And so then, of course, you're right that they also have yachts and paintings.

But first, that's not a big part of their wealth.