south coast, I am sure our friend biz paid tax like all good people but he was in the favourable position that he paid tax in France where you only pay around 5% to 10% income tax as a pilot because you make your money outside the country.
This is not the exact explanation, in France anyone can use what is called 'Frais réels' ie Real expenses scheme ( Pilot or not , being paid offshore or being a goverment employee); instead of a standard deduction of the 'net' income (this is not 100% accurate but good enough for the explanation).
So anyone can add up (with some limitations), the expenses related to the course of his employment ( car, toll, dry cleaning etc.) If you are employed as a pilot or declared yourself as a pilot, there is a scheme , negotiated year to year by the french pilot unions, that authorized some fix amount of deductions depending where you have been flying to . These sums are directly deducted from your 'net' income. Therefore at the end of the year if you flew a lot internationaly, you will find yourself with a significant reduction. This is not the best part, if you are married with kids, have a maid and bought a residence for rent under specifics schemes, all of this is deductible. For example you pay the maid 12180 Euro a year, you can deduct from the taxes to pay 4927 euros (that was for this year); therefore if you had to pay 10000 euros of taxes you end up pying 5073 only...
So it is a misunderstanding that you do not pay taxes, they are just spread differently.
With the new contract, this is a new deal, and discussions are in progress in order to play with a better set of cards. The only thing that I can say is that with the 25% at source; we cannot benefit with any of the previous scheme, because we are not employed by NTA but by a staff company and paying ourselves to be self employed on top, would impact our salaries drastically (since we are already paying pension, social security etc.) notwithstanding a pure income tax discussion.