A flavour gauge theory is observable only if the symmetry is broken at relatively low energies. The intrinsic parity-violation of the fermion representations in a flavour theory describing quark, lepton and higgsino masses and mixings generically requires anomaly cancellation by new fermions. Benchmark supersymmetric flavour models are built and studied to argue that: i) the flavour symmetry breaking should be about three orders of magnitude above the higgsino mass, enough also to efficiently

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... ppress FCNC and CP violations coming from higher-dimensional operators; ii) new fermions with exotic decays into lighter particles are typically required at scales of the order of the higgsino mass.