For the Judge of the Paris Administrative Court, the donations of a patron at a university are not covered by the “Secret of Business” and must be communicated. A decision that should make jurisprudence.
by
Can “Business Secret” be invoked not to disclose the amount of funding brought by a patron to a higher education institution? The answer is clearly no. Friday, April 22, the Paris Administrative Court, in a notified decision, enjoined at the PSL University (Paris Science and Letters) and its sponsors, including BNP-Paribas, to provide “without censorship” the conventions governing the patronage of the Sciences License for a Sustainable World.
Since the creation of this postbac training dedicated to the issues of the ecological transition, which welcomed its first students in September 2020, a group of PSL students tried, in vain, to obtain the details of the patronage convention signed by both parties, regretting that the public institution lends itself to a “cleaning” of the image of the bank pointed by Oxfam as one of the biggest polluters French through funding from the fossil energy sector. According to our information, the amount of this donation would amount to about 8 million euros over five years. A data never confirmed by the bank, no more than by the university. Constraint by the Access Commission for Administrative Documents (CADA) to make public The document in October 2020, PSL had finally communicated a mixed version, the financial mentions being masked by a black line.
After two years of legal battle, the collective “PSL counterattack”, which had seized the administrative court in November 2020, therefore won. The decision of the administrative judge should even be jurisprudence, has no other matter having been judged relating to the communication of financial data as part of the sponsorship between a company and a university. The sciences license for a sustainable world is one of the first postbac formations to be funded in part by a company. This type of partnership – which gives the donor a tax reduction of 60% of the donation, was so far reserved for a perimeter dedicated to research and innovation, through chairs, laboratories and training de master more turned to the professional world.
Protect the “strategy of the company”
During the hearing on April 8, the public rapporteur recalled that the notion of business secrets, born of a law of July 2018 to preserve the innovation and strategic information of the companies, requires three criteria : The secret of information, its commercial value and the fact that it is protected by its legitimate holder. As part of a sponsorship agreement, these criteria did not appear to him, while the annual accounts of the PSL Scientific Cooperation Foundation – Signatory of the Convention – are “communicable to any person” and that “the BNP communicates Itself many information, including the total amount of its donations, on its website “.
You have 50% of this article to be read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.