Multinationals have taken advantage of the lack of regulation of their transnational activities, with the consent of states, to accumulate financial and natural resources. The accumulation of these resources has been achieved to the detriment of populations and states, whose capacity to create and maintain effective public services has been progressively eroded.

This phenomenon is made possible by the existence of tax and legal havens. These havens offer economic actors, both individuals and companies, numerous services and advantages, such as banking secrecy, tax secrecy, relaxed processes for creating companies, and high legal opacity stemming from the uncooperative nature of these jurisdictions.

These havens are therefore ideal for setting up schemes that allow economic actors to cover up illegal profits, for example, from corruption, or to bypass tax laws and environmental or human rights protections.

The continued existence of these havens severely undermines the ability of states to protect tax revenues, which are the necessary counterpart to resource exploitation and are an indispensable element to the implementation of public policies for the protection of fundamental rights and the environment.

Without comprehensive transparency mechanisms for intra-group transactions and effective sanctions against the economic actors in question, the use of these jurisdictions will continue to increase global inequality.

Moreover, it is imperative to be able to effectively return funds that may have been illegally misappropriated to States and populations through these arrangements. Like other developed countries, France has hosted illicit assets, or  so-called "ill-gotten gains".