Portugal’s president has weighed into the current political argument that the nation’s richest entrepreneurs should pay a special crisis tax on their fortunes by stating that inheritance tax should be reintroduced.
Speaking over the weekend, Aníbal Cavaco Silva admitted it would be difficult to tax the total wealth of those holding fortunes in the country but said that such a move would have to include a tax on inheritances and bequests.
The president argued that it would be “very difficult” to tax the wealth of an individual in its totality when inheritance tax had been abolished in Portugal.
“This is a tax that exists in most countries and is aimed at the redistribution of wealth to those who didn’t help to build it.”
Cavaco Silva also said there were ”limits” to the amount of sacrifice the Portuguese could take on and those limits were not “far off”.
However, the right-wing CDS-PP party, which is currently in coalition with the PSD party, is against the reintroduction stating that it doesn’t make sense reintroducing the tax since “death is not a taxable act or fact.”
This week Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho made whistle-stop tours of various European cities which are facing similar financial hardships to Portugal and which are considering increasing taxes on the very wealthy.
