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 suppress 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.Comment: 19 pages, references added, one comment and one footnote added,
results unchange