A fifth of France’s 100 richest people have moved a total of €17 billion to neighbouring Belgium in recent years, a report showed at the weekend, saying the exodus is largely due to French socialist President François Hollande’s tax policies.

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The report, published in Belgian financial daily L’Echo, lists France’s richest man, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, media moguls Stéphane Courbit and Bernard Tapie, as well as the Mulliez family, which controls the Auchan supermarket chain, among those who have made the move.

But many of France’s wealthy appear to have crossed over the border only recently.

Many “have shown up in the past three years, in other words since François Hollande was inaugurated as president,” the paper writes, attributing it to the socialist government’s pressure to get the economy back into the black amid soaring unemployment and a ballooning deficit.

Since he came to power in 2012, Hollande has raised income taxes, VAT (value-added tax) and corporate taxes.

Although Hollande failed in his bid to hike the tax rate on incomes of more than €1 million to a heartstopping 75 percent, the mere threat of such a possibility sent some of France’s richest running to the hills, including actor Gérard Depardieu who now lives in Mordovia in Russia, after first setting his sights on Belgium.

It probably didn’t help matters that Hollande was once quoted as saying: “I don’t like the rich”.

L’Echo also cited Belgium’s generally lower income taxes as well as France’s solidarity tax on the wealthy, known as ISF, which ranges between 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent on earnings exceeding €1.31 million, as a further motivation to lure the French.

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