France wants global oil tax

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has asked the head of the International Monetary Fund to consider a tax on oil companies’ profits to help countries without energy reserves, the finance minister said Wednesday.

Christine Lagarde told LCI television that Sarkozy had asked the new IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a Frenchman, to consider a tax that would affect oil companies worldwide.

The decision comes in the wake of announcements of record earnings by many oil majors, boosted by historic crude prices.

Sarkozy wants “to think on a global level about a kind of tax that would allow those countries that have the least energy to benefit from these exceptional earnings,” Lagarde said.

AP