Mon dieu, he's leaving! - Boston Herald

It's fun — perhaps even therapeutic — to take time away from our own post-fiscal cliff woes to check in on French President Francois Hollande and his socialist government's efforts to tax the rich there.

In fact, Hollande's promise to raise the tax rate on those with earned income above 1 million euros ($1.3 million) from its current 41 percent to the confiscatory 75 percent has caused a number of France's more high profile millionaires to leave their beloved homeland.

First Oscar-winning actor Gerard Depardieu was reported to have moved to neighboring Belgium right after Hollande's election. (Bernard Arnault, chief of the giant luxury goods firm LVMH and worth an estimated $41 billion, also announced his imminent departure for Belgium.)

But this week Depardieu went quite a bit further. He announced he would surrender his passport and his French social security card and become a Russian citizen. In fact, the Russians are so pleased with the development that it was the office of President Vladimir Putin that announced that Depardieu's application for citizenship had been approved. (Apparently even the notoriously slow Russian bureaucracy can speed things up when the president demands it.)

Russia has a flat tax rate of 13 percent. However, wealthy enemies of Putin, a former Soviet KGB agent, might offer up advice to Depardieu that it isn't always about the money and Russian prisons have too often been the great equalizer.

But for now the 64-year-old actor, who claims to have paid 145 million euros ($190 million) over the last 45 years in French taxes, is cashing in on his Russian fame. He has already made several high-profile trips there, has done ads for Sovietsky Bank's credit card and played the title role in the made for TV film "Rasputin." Now it doesn't get much more Russian than that!