The French oil and gas group TotalEnergies announced, on Wednesday January 8, a net profit of 20.5 billion dollars (19.1 billion euros) for the year 2022, up 28% compared to 2021. is the largest profit ever made by the French major and one of the best in the history of the CAC 40.
Excluding accounting losses related to its withdrawal from Russia, amounting to nearly $15 billion, the company’s adjusted net profit (which excludes exceptional items) amounts to $36.2 billion.
Given its results, TotalEnergies will grant its shareholders a total dividend of 3.81 euros per share for the year 2022, including 1 euro in exceptional dividend, already paid in December 2022, and it will cancel shares equity, which will mechanically benefit the historical shareholders.
On the sidelines of this announcement on the company’s results, demonstrators sprayed red paint on the headquarters of TotalEnergies on Wednesday morning. Activists from Alternatiba and Friends of the Earth denounce “excessive superprofits” of the group “even though the energy crisis has plunged France into uncertainty and 12 million French people are living in fuel poverty”.
At the end of January, the CEO of TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanné, announced that the group would pay more than 2 billion euros in “solidarity contribution on the profits of energy groups”in the European Union and in the United Kingdom. “Refining lost money for years, and now the year we start making money, it’s overtaxed as superprofit, when it’s just profit”, he regretted. The manager also specified that his group would pay “33 billion dollars” in taxes and levies across the world in 2022. “We are in the ten largest contributors in the world”he said.
The European Commission had made it known at the end of September that it wanted to request a “temporary solidarity contribution” to the producers and distributors of gas, coal and oil who are making massive profits thanks to the surge in prices caused by the war in Ukraine. It must be set at 33% of the share of the superprofits of 2022, i.e. profits more than 20% higher than the average for the years 2019-2021, while taking into account the measures taken by the States taxing these benefits already. France has transposed it into its 2023 budget.
The Commission took care not to use the word “tax”, because any new tax provision at European level would have required the unanimity of the Twenty-Seven, a more complicated and risky procedure than adoption by qualified majority.