France offered in January to suspend until the end of the year instalments of its tax on big digital companies’ income in France while an international deal to re-write the rules of cross-border taxation was negotiated this year.”Never has a digital tax been more legitimate and more necessary,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told journalists on a conference call, adding such companies were doing better than most during the coronavirus crisis.

Nearly 140 countries are negotiating the first major rewriting of international tax rules in more than a generation, to take better account of the rise of big tech companies that often book profit in low-tax countries.However, the fallout from the coronavirus outbreak has left finance ministries more focused on saving their economies than ov…