A MARVELLOUS gesture from David Beckham, announcing as he signs for French team Paris Saint-Germain, that he is to donate his £3.5m salary to a local children’s charity.

I’m surmising that he wasn’t able to give some of it at least to a British charity for tax reasons.

Never mind, a decent act.

Beckham, who already has a £100m fortune, will still receive payments from the sale of some merchandise. What the tax arrangements for these amounts are I do not know. But had he kept his salary then under in-coming new French tax laws he would have been forced to hand over 75 per cent to the tax man across the Channel. Better by far to give that to needy children.

On this side of Le Manche, as the French call the water between us and them, footballers do not often donate their salaries to charity.

Indeed, they still, for reasons I simply do not understand, are entitled to enjoy benefit years that are classed as tax free.

Some of them also employ a nifty technique to avoid paying even the UK’s modest, in comparison, higher tax levels on all of their income. By being paid part of their money as image rights and pushing that through a separate company some players pay a fraction of the amount in tax they would if the whole lump was taxed at source.

But hey, in the world of football plus ca change?