France discreetly suspends its register of beneficial owners of companies

Discreetly, France has just taken a big leap backwards in terms of financial transparency. Without any official announcement, the French register of beneficial owners of companies was suspended on Sunday 1^is January, as noted The world.

This platform, opened in April 2021, allowed any citizen to easily know the identity of the owners of French companies. Called for a long time by civil society organisations, this tool was widely considered to be a major step forward in terms of financial transparency and the fight against fraud and money laundering. In the absence of information on the beneficial owners, criminal figures or persons under sanction can in fact hide more easily behind nominees or front companies.

Home page of the national business register kept by the INPI, which listed the beneficial owners of companies until January 1, 2023. INPI

These data suddenly disappeared from the register in the early hours of 2023. When questioned, the office of the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, refers the responsibility to the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), which ensures the technical management of the register: “There was neither instruction nor political validation from the ministry. »

For its part, the INPI pleads the technical error and ensures that the data “will be put back online as soon as technically possible”. A backpedal from a first message sent to the Monde on January 4, in which the INPI simply explained that the data of beneficial owners would no longer 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 the access of the general public to the European registers of beneficial owners, 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 crushing blow for many civil society actors, who use this data to document financial crimes.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers “The Court destroyed in one day the result of years of work”: stupor in civil society after a judicial decision on financial transparency

A political decision

For a few weeks, the Ministry of the Economy had been in discussion with the INPI to assess the legal consequences of the CJEU’s judgment. “The arbitration has not yet been renderedassures a source in the cabinet of Bruno Le Maire. It will be in the next few days, and we will explain. »

Deleting access to this register “is illegal under French law”, explains Vincent Couronne, from the collective Les Surligneurs

You have 52.85% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.