This register, created in 2021, allowed everyone to know the real owner of a company.
by Manon Romain, Maxime Vaudano, Abdelhak El Idrissi, Adrien Sénécat and Anne Michel
In all discretion, France has just leap back in terms of financial transparency. Without any official announcement, the French register of effective companies of companies was suspended on Sunday 1 er January, as noted Mo12345lemonde.
This platform , open in April 2021, allowed any citizen to easily know the identity of the owners of French companies. Long -claimed by civil society organizations, this tool was widely considered as a major advance in matters of financial transparency and the fight against fraud and money laundering. In the absence of information on effective beneficiaries, criminal personalities or under sanctions can indeed hide more easily behind nominees or companies-ecrans.
These data suddenly disappeared from the register in the early hours of 2023. Interviewed, the cabinet of the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, refers responsibility to the Institute National Industrial Property (INPI), which ensures technical management of the register: “There was no instructions or political validation on the part of the ministry.”
For its part, the INPI argues the technical error and ensures that the data “will be put back online as soon as technically possible”. A retropedering compared to a first message sent to the world on January 4, in which the INPI simply explained that the data of the effective beneficiaries would now be “no longer published in open data” due to “a decision of the European Court of justice “. A reference to the judgment of November 22, 2022 of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which declared illegal access by the general public to the European registers of effective beneficiaries, in the name of respect for privacy.
This decision had already led eight European countries to suddenly suspend access to their registers (the Netherlands, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Luxembourg). A blow for many actors from civil society, who use this data to document financial crimes.
a political decision
For a few weeks, the Ministry of the Economy has been under discussion with the INPI to assess the legal consequences of the CJEU judgment. “Arbitration has not yet been returned, ensures a source in the cabinet of Bruno Le Maire. It will be in the coming days, and we will explain it.”
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