I'm the Dauphin in France

Chapter 517: Cleansing Unscrupulous Tax Farmers

Southern suburbs of Paris.

In the interrogation room on the second floor of the National Prison No. 1, a man with tattoos all over his neck and arms lowered his head and said nervously, "I swear, Mr. Barna told me to do this!

"He hired someone to make those fake documents. I just followed his instructions and handed them over to the tax bureau..."

"You signed all the documents for the handover with the tax bureau," the police officer sitting opposite him said coldly, "Forging tax documents is likely to result in a prison sentence of five to ten years."

"No..." The tattooed man shuddered and said hurriedly, "I can testify against Barna. Oh, and my men can also prove it!"

"It's Recdian Mallet de Barna, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's him."

"Where is he now?"

"He should be in Coles Street..."

The intelligence officer standing nearby and listening immediately whispered to his men, "Go and bring him here."

"Yes, sir!"

As the interrogation continued, more and more high-ranking tax farmers were confessed and joined the new team of people on trial.

At the same time, the assets of all tax farmers involved in the case began to be seized.

This was the ruling of the High Court - the case of fraud was clear and would inevitably involve tax accounts, so the seizure of assets was very reasonable.

On the other hand, tax authorities across France, with the cooperation of the police, began to seal off local tax farms and arrested almost all tax collectors.

The local authorities are not like Paris where they have to consider the impact and try to arrest as few people as possible.

The local tax bureau is only worried that next year's tax revenue will be affected, so they arrest all the criminals they can. At worst, they can release them later if they find no problem.

Just two days later, as more and more senior tax farmers confessed, the "document falsification" case began to spread to the giants of the Tax Farmers Association.

In the carriage, Barrot, one of the leaders of the General Association of Tax Farmers, looked gloomily at the huge headline in the Paris Business Daily - "Shock! Tax farmers collectively participated in the falsification of tax documents, and more than 150 people have been arrested", and felt a suffocating pain in his chest.

The day before yesterday, he was still planning how to adjust the scale of the tax farm and increase the illegal wine trade to maintain the original level of income after obtaining the salt and wine taxes from four provinces including Reims and Champagne. As a result, he received the news that two of his most important tax farmers were arrested for forging documents.

He knew that he would be exposed soon.

Although forging documents was not a serious crime for him, according to convention, he only needed to pay a sum of money - probably no more than 25 francs - to obtain bail. However, he would eventually face the trouble of appearing in court for trial, and it would inevitably affect his other businesses.

At this time, Barlow was somewhat envious of Morel, Goldmid and others, whose businesses were mostly abroad. If things really didn't work out, they could give up their business in France and not have to deal with these cases.

However, he was born and raised in France, with his roots here. Now he no longer thinks about tax-franchising and just hopes to get through the current troubles.

Soon, the carriage stopped at the Square of Versailles Palace. Barlow got out of the carriage, lowered his head and walked quickly towards the gate of Versailles Palace.

In the finance minister's office, he looked at Brian with a pleading look on his face and said, "Archbishop, I really don't know about these things. These are all the ideas of those people below...

"Of course, I am also responsible. I am willing to pay the fine for this."

He glanced at Briand and continued, "Look, 50 francs is okay... Oh, no, 80 francs!" Briand just stared at the table in front of him in silence until Barlow increased the fine to 100 million francs. Then he looked up and said calmly, "Count Barlow, the behavior of the General Association of Tax Farmers this time has had a huge impact on the national finances, so much so that I have to issue special government bonds to make up for the losses caused by the tax chaos at the beginning of next year."

"National debt?" Barlow was stunned for a moment, then he reacted and nodded, "Ah, yes, we need to prepare funds to deal with the chaos. Respected Archbishop, I am willing to buy 3 million francs of national debt to support you..."

Brian shook his head slightly and held up a finger.

"One million..." Barlow only said half of the sentence, and then suddenly exclaimed, "You want me to buy 1 million government bonds?!

"This is too much... What is the interest on this special bond?"

"3%," Brian said. "One year."

Barlow's face turned green.

If you use 1 million francs to pay taxes, you can even make 300 million. But if you buy some kind of government bond, you will only get 30 in interest!

He stood up dissatisfiedly, bowed, said, "I'll consider it," and turned and left.

With 400 million francs, he could handle the tax fraud no matter how he arranged it. Why should he bother with Brian's face for such a trivial matter?
After he left, Baron Morel, Borore and other giants also came to Brian's office one after another, and even Ford came to "admit his mistake" before dinner.

However, they all left soon with gloomy faces.

Dusk.

On the second floor of the Tuileries Palace, Joseph finished listening to Brian's report and frowned slightly, "Only Baron Pellier promised to buy 700 million national debts. No one else wants to accept it?"

"Yes, Your Highness." Brian hesitated, "Perhaps 1 million is a bit too much.

"According to my calculations, we will need another 1 million francs to meet next year's funding needs. So they only need to contribute 600 million francs each."

Joseph shook his head. "You are only talking about the cost of maintaining the government's policies. If you want to do things like dredging canals and building wooden tracks, it will be far from enough."

Brian was stunned. After such a big tax reform, it was already a rare achievement to maintain stability. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince was actually thinking about building projects such as canals and rail transit?

Joseph ignored his expression, stroking his teacup and muttering to himself: "It seems that we need to give them some strength."

In the past, we couldn’t find a way to deal with these tax farmers, but now that we have a breakthrough in document falsification, can we still let them off easily?
You know, in history, all tax farmers were sentenced to death by the Jacobins, and many of them were sentenced too heavily, but it was enough to show that this group had a bad record.

……

On the deck of the French Navy frigate "Wonderland Forest" heading to the port of Calvi in ​​Corsica, Napoleon looked out at the vague outline of the hills and sighed deeply.

On the small table next to him was a copy of The Times from more than a month ago. The translator had read it to him many times. The news about Paulie's rape case had created a huge crack in his beliefs.

He thought of Paulie's works that he had read since childhood and shook his head.

What he said was for the Corsican people and to drive away foreign oppression, but it was just an excuse for him to deceive the public!

Napoleon looked to the side and rear of the transport ships, which carried two artillery batteries and hundreds of infantry. This force could win him the position of commander-in-chief of the Corsica Army.

(End of this chapter)