US billionaire Bill Gates has called on the world’s richest nations to accept a proposal to tax financial transactions, popularly known as the Robin Hood Tax to help fight global poverty.

Gates and fellow billionaire Warren Buffet have joined a growing list of politicians, international organizations, religious and civil society leaders to press finance ministers attending the G20 Summit in Cannes to adopt the measure to address current financial inequalities.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who commissioned the Gates Report for the Cannes  Summit, is a strong supporter of an EU-wide tax on financial transactions and has spoken out against British and American reluctance to sign on to it. The Robin Hood Tax has been submitted to the French and German parliaments while Brazil and Argentina have joined South Africa and Spain in support of the tax.

Speaking to reporters in Cannes, Sarkozy insisted that the Gates proposal is “technically possible" and according to Gates could raise an extra $48bn a year whichwould go a long way to help fight global poverty and assist developed nations to meet their aid pledges which are expected to drop dramatically in 2012.

The Robin Hood Tax did not originate with Bill Gates and is officially known in financial circles as the FTT (Financial Transaction Tax) and previously called the Tobin tax, after American economist James Tobin, who proposed constraints on financial transactions to limit their destabilizing effects on markets and the economy. 

The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters renamed it the Robin Hood Tax an appellation quickly adopted by the media. The legendary Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor just as FTTs would do. But the ‘rich’ in this case would be banking and financial institutions and the ‘poor’ the public services and institutions that assist those in need.

At least three US billionaires are in favor of the Robin Hood Tax, including Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros who point out that FTTs are not a tax on all wealth, only on financial transactions such as the purchase and sale of stocks, bonds, commodities, mutual funds, and derivatives – mechanisms widely blamed for the financial crisis that began in 2008.

Other notable supporters of the tax, along with President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel include England’s Archbishop Rowan Williams, actor Bill Nighy, Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and a host of civil society groups like Oxfam and Friends of the Earth.