The case of Samir Nasri (former international footballer) has been making headlines in recent weeks, and it deserves more than just being treated as a simple sports anecdote.
It highlights, with rare clarity, a phenomenon that now affects all taxpayers claiming to have transferred their tax residence abroad: the growing impact of digital evidence in tax audits.
The facts
Samir Nasri, a former French international who played for Olympique de Marseille, Arsenal and Manchester City, officially declared himself a tax resident in the United Arab Emirates, a jurisdiction with almost no personal income tax.
Retired from professional football since 2021, he now works as a consultant for Canal+, which requires him to be regularly present in France.
This is precisely where the issue arises.
The French tax authorities carried out an in-depth audit of his tax situation. To establish that the former player’s real centre of life was in Paris and not Dubai, the authorities used a rather unexpected method: analysing his food delivery data.
The result is unequivocal: during 2022 alone, Nasri allegedly placed more than 212 Deliveroo orders delivered to addresses in Paris—an average of nearly four orders per week throughout the year.
The tax authorities are now claiming more than €5.5 million from him, including back taxes on income and real estate wealth tax, increased by penalties for fraudulent intent. The administration considers that the move to Dubai was an artificial arrangement, given that the majority of his professional, social, and domestic life took place in France.
The legal issue: where is tax residence really located?
In tax law, residence is not determined by a declared address or registration in a foreign registry. It is assessed based on a set of factual elements.
In France, a person is considered a tax resident if their home or principal place of stay is in France, if they carry out their main professional activity there, or if their centre of economic interests is located there. Only one of these criteria needs to be met.
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In Belgium, the principle is similar: Article 2, §1, 1° of the Income Tax Code 1992 subjects to personal income tax any individual who has established in Belgium their tax domicile or the seat of their wealth. The tax domicile is the place where the individual has established the essential centre of their vital, private, and professional interests. The Belgian Court of Cassation has consistently emphasized that this notion is a matter of fact, assessed globally, and not merely an administrative registration issue. Nationality, for its part, is irrelevant in both countries.
Proof of residence therefore results from a consistent set of indicators: duration of stays, presence of family, housing, bank accounts, professional activity, energy consumption, subscriptions, and so on. No single element is decisive on its own—it is the overall picture that matters.
What the Nasri case teaches us
What is new in the Nasri case is not the principle of a body of evidence—it has long been established—but rather the nature of the evidence used.
Until recently, residence audits relied on relatively traditional elements: border crossing records, hotel invoices, presence of family in the country, bank accounts, employment contracts. Authorities often had to reconstruct facts from scattered documents, sometimes difficult to obtain.
The digital economy has changed everything. Our daily lives now generate timestamped, geolocated data that is automatically stored by the platforms we use.
A Deliveroo order records not only the time and delivery address, but also serves as proof of physical presence at that location at that specific moment. Multiplied by 212 deliveries over a year, this history creates a timeline of presence far more precise than any administrative declaration.
Tax authorities have recognized this as an opportunity. In an era of automatic exchange of financial information between states and easier access to platform-held data, the argument of a simple tourist stay is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain when digital data tells a completely different story.
The Nasri case is not an isolated one. It is part of a structural trend: European tax authorities now have increasingly powerful tools (often with the help of AI) to reconstruct taxpayers’ real residence, regardless of their formal declarations.
For any taxpayer considering a change of residence—or who has already opted for residence abroad—the lesson is simple: consistency between declared status and daily reality is no longer optional; it is a condition for tax survival. Tax authorities will stop at nothing and will become increasingly creative in proving where you truly live.
The issue of tax residence is one of the most consequential in international tax law. Whether anticipating a move abroad, securing an existing situation, or responding to a request from the authorities, Vanbelle Law Boutique assists its clients with a tailored approach, combining legal rigor with in-depth knowledge of Belgian and international administrative practices.
