Actor Depardieu granted Russian citizenship

Gerard Depardieu, the French actor who has waged a battle against a proposed super-tax on millionaires in his native country, has been granted Russian citizenship.

A brief announcement on the Kremlin website revealed president Vladimir Putin signed the citizenship grant following an application from the actor.

The star of the film Green Card has been vocal in his opposition to French president François Hollande’s plans to raise the tax on earned income above €1m to 75% from the current high of 41%. Russia has a flat 13% rate.

“I have never killed any one, I don’t think I’ve been unworthy, I’ve paid €145m in taxes over 45 years,” Depardieu wrote in an open letter in mid-December to the prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, who had called the actor “pathetic”.

“I will neither complain nor brag, but I refuse to be called ‘pathetic,’” the 64-year-old actor wrote.

A representative for the former Oscar nominee declined to say whether he had accepted the Russian offer, and refused all comment.

Yesterday was a holiday in Russia and officials from the Federal Tax Service and Federal Migration Service could not be reached for comment on whether the decision would require Depardieu to have a residence in Russia.

Depardieu said in his letter he would surrender his passport and French social security card.

In October, the mayor of a small Belgian border town announced that Depardieu had bought a house and set up legal residence there, a move that was slammed by the Socialist government.

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the French government spokeswoman, did not comment directly on Depardieu’s tax fight, but drew a clear distinction between people who have personal or professional reasons to live abroad, and “French citizens who proclaim loudly and clearly that they they’re exiling themselves for fiscal reasons”.

She said Putin’s offer “is an exclusive prerogative of the Russian chief of state”.

Depardieu has had increasingly high-profile ties with Russia. Last October he visited Grozny, to celebrate the birthday of Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. And in 2011, he was in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region to play the lead in Rasputin.