In autumn 2022, in the wake of the energy crisis that had occurred in the spring, two levies on ‘superprofits’ – one on electricity generation (the CRIM) and the other on the oil industry (the CES) – were proposed by the European Council, passed by the French Parliament, and subsequently implemented by the government. The expected revenue for 2022 was initially €12.3 billion for the CRIM, but actual revenue turned out to be 20 times lower, at €625 million. For its part, the IPP had estimated in December 2022 that the revenue from the CES could reach up to 3 billion euros; following the stability programme submitted by the government to the Commission last April, which already revealed revenue rounded to 100 million euros, IPP researchers have revised their estimates and are now able to indicate, based on the oil companies’ tax returns made available in early 2024, that the revenue from the CES is even lower, standing at around 69 million euros, which is 40 times less than their initial forecast.
Laurent Bach, co-head of the firms division at the IPP, documents and examines the low final yield of this ‘one-off’ tax in two separate Blog posts.
The first Blog post, entitled ‘A brief history of a lower-than-expected contribution’, looks back at the various estimates made, the assumptions formulated and the data used to produce these estimates, as well as the reasons behind such discrepancies with the final revenue.
