The Les Échos article is a sort of use case for the API of Pappers, a French company-data platform, run on the 160 start-ups of the Next40 / FT120, the French government’s lists of the country’s most promising tech companies. Pappers pulled the data for 2020, 2021 and 2022, and the share of companies that published their accounts is surprising (or not):
And yet filing your accounts with the commercial court registry is a legal obligation in France, under article L-232 of the Commercial Code.
In 2018, parliament passed a law toughening the penalties for not filing, when Sapin II, France’s transparency law, was voted. Before that, the fine was €1,500, and €3,000 for repeat offenders. Hardly enough to scare Lactalis, the dairy giant, or Bigard, both named in the debates. The penalty is now 2% of average daily revenue, for every day of delay.
The amendment came in a particular context. In September 2017, Maxence Bigard, son of Jean-Paul of the same name, of the company of the same name, which happens to be France’s biggest meat processor, refused to disclose the company’s financial information during a parliamentary hearing. He also refused to answer questions about why its results weren’t published.
Exasperated, Ruffin, a member of parliament, let fly:
Were they in The Godfather, he wanted to know, or at a hearing of a National Assembly committee?
Lactalis, which had given the committee the same answers, eventually published the accounts of most of the group’s companies. Its communications director explained at the time that this served no purpose at all:
How, he asked, would detailed knowledge of the group’s consolidated accounts or margins make for a calmer discussion of the price of milk?
That was precisely the point. Understanding how profitable these companies are, companies that are quick to talk up their difficulties when it suits them, to push prices up. And which, by a ratchet effect, struggle a bit more to bring them down.
In June 2023, milk was bought from farmers at €4301 per 1,000 litres, and sold at around €1,270.2 Lactalis, with its €2bn in revenue and €150M in net profit, was in fact directly targeted by dairy farmers this summer.