Mr. Paul Ginnell:

I will try to answer the questions as well as possible. The wealth tax would apply to people earning over €100,000 but it would be phased in over time in a ten-year programme. Currently there are many taxes, including those which affect lower and middle income earners. There would be a comprehensive property tax, as I explained earlier, and there would be other forms of wealth tax. They would initially impact people earning over €100,000 but they would expand over time to others.

We have not specifically considered tax avoidance, although we are aware of how people can move wealth around and avoid tax. It has not been examined by us in great detail but it is a key concern. One of the other proposals is identification of tax loopholes used by tax exiles and ways in which people remove income and forms of wealth from the tax system. There is the idea of making citizenship the basis for taxation, which could be another approach to address how people use loopholes to move wealth outside the tax system.

If wealth was taxed on the basis of citizenship, people would be taxed on that basis in another way.