Is the French Anti-Corruption Agency Stepping up its Enforcement Role?

In the nearly 10 years since its creation, the French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA) had never issued a financial penalty pursuant to its authority under Article 17 of the Transparency, Anti-Corruption and Economic Modernisation Act, known as Sapin II. That changed this July with a €350,000 fine against an unnamed company, and a €60,000 personal fine against its legal representative. The decision (in French) followed a 2024-2025 audit that revealed the company lacked seven of the eight required Sapin II compliance measures. The company argued that the remediation steps it took after the audit should mitigate the need for a penalty, but the AFA’s Sanctions Committee, an independent body within the Agency, disagreed. The Committee did, however, agree to allow the company to remain anonymous.

To understand the significance of this sanction, I spoke recently with Valentina Lana, an attorney who teaches law at Sciences Po, currently holds an in-house ethics and compliance role in the private sector, and works with Sapin II's principal author. I was curious in particular to know whether this decision signals that the AFA is stepping up its enforcement role.

First, Lana told me, it is not possible to know whether there was an actual, underlying act of bribery. The AFA can only audit companies to determine whether an adequate prevention program has been rolled out. A company can be referred to the Sanctions Committee if the AFA considers the program up to standard. Moreover, she explained, the AFA has two main roles: to advise companies and public bodies on building their anticorruption programs, and to audit whether those programs actually work. Given that the AFA lacks the resources to review every company subject to Article 17, it prioritizes sectors by year and selects firms to audit. The company in this case may have just happened to be on that year’s schedule, or a whistleblower may have flagged its poor compliance approach. 

The previous times that the AFA deemed a prevention program insufficient and referred the case to the Sanctions Committee, the Committee declined to sanction, instead issuing a compliance injunction rather than a monetary fine. In Lana’s view, those outcomes generated a kind of risk-aversion within the Agency. But this time, she explained, the Committee’s decision was clear-cut, given the extent of the company’s compliance deficiencies. As she put it, “At first glance, when the decision says seven measures are missing, one can only think the company basically did not do much.” 

Lana also flagged the key procedural moment in this instance, as noted above. In the prior cases, the Sanctions Committee had given companies extra hearings and time to build a compliance program before ruling on potential penalties. It was based on that precedent that the company wanted credit for its remediation efforts. When the Sanctions Committee took a less forgiving posture, judging the company as of the date of its control report, it said that to do otherwise would both undermine Sapin II’s deterrence power and be anti-competitive.

The fines, Lana pointed out, sit well under the Sapin II ceiling (€1 million for an entity and €200,000 for an individual, respectively). Lana considers those numbers intentional; she feels the AFA is filling its “pedagogical” function, showing that the Sanctions Committee is active while not seeking to destroy the first company it catches. Because the AFA allowed the company to remain anonymous, it will not suffer reputational damage, which might weaken the deterrent effect of stepped-up enforcement. But by the same token, such a move demonstrates that the AFA is willing to work with companies, rather than being excessively punitive, which may encourage companies to improve their compliance performance.

Moving forward, it will be worth watching whether the AFA now moves more often and more aggressively, whether low fines and anonymity remain the template, or whether a future case tests the AFA’s approach. One thing is clear, Lana indicated during our conversation: ten years after Sapin II, French companies need to know what is required of them and to show they acted on it.

Marc Schleifer

Governance, Democracy and Economic Development Expert