Is the French Anti-Corruption Agency Stepping up its Enforcement Role? (Part 2)
Previously for BriberyMatters, I covered the first financial sanctions issued against a firm by the French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA), in conversation with Valentina Lana, who teaches law at Sciences Po and is an in-house private sector ethics and compliance attorney. The same July week that decision was announced, the AFA also issued its 2025 Activity Report (in French), offering a broader look at its work. The release provided a useful jumping off point for a continued discussion with Lana, exploring what conclusions can be drawn from the report.
Lana characterized the AFA’s approach as increasingly robust, as expected for an agency entering a stage of maturity, following the December 2024 restructuring detailed in the report. The AFA created two “sub-directorates,” aimed, respectively, at countering corruption in the public sector, split into departments covering national and local government bodies, and in the economic sector, which encompasses both private firms and state-owned enterprises. The AFA’s control and advisory functions are distributed across those sub-directorates such that, Lana said, she hears from colleagues that the Agency is becoming more effective, sharing approaches and avoiding silos. She noted that the restructuring will advance the November 2025 National Multiannual Anti-Corruption Plan 2025-2029, setting out a whole-of-government approach to fighting corruption and closer coordination across ministries.
An element of the report that stood out was a near-tripling of whistleblower complaints submitted to the AFA, from 802 in 2024 to 2,257 in 2025. However, the report makes clear that only 11 percent of those were admissible for review. Lana told me that there is no connection here to any particular change in corruption levels, more attention to the issue of corruption in France or better data collection. Instead, she said, citizens are increasingly aware of the existence of these reporting channels (in the AFA as much as in other organizations, both public and private), and often use them to file complaints about issues that at times are not relevant to the Agency’s work or lack merit. Likewise, as the report lays out, much of the increase in recent convictions for integrity offenses are tied to the Urgo pharmaceutical case; though as explained here, that case did lead the AFA to institute stronger controls in the healthcare sector.
One sector-specific shift Lana highlighted is an increased focus on ports and airports as high-risk. As reflected in the report, the AFA was granted new powers following a June 2025 amendment to a new French law on narco-trafficking. Now all companies operating in critical activities in French port zones must have an anticorruption compliance program, whereas under Sapin II, all other firms have applicable staff size and turnover thresholds to introduce such a program. In this way, as she and I discussed, there are some parallels to the US pivoting FCPA enforcement to confront drug cartels and other transnational criminal organizations.
Another finding in the report I asked Lana about is the point that many French subsidiaries of foreign parent companies are importing their headquarters’ codes of conduct without adapting them for French realities. Here, Lana added an important nuance: such a practice is entirely legal. She told me that at one point, there had been a proposed "Sapin III" reform that would have required large French subsidiaries to maintain their own independent programs, but the provision did not survive the legislative process. Finally, I asked Lana about the report’s discussion of the AFA’s use of convention judiciaire d'intérêt public (CJIP) mechanism, the “judicial agreement in the public interest,” akin to a deferred prosecution agreement in the US. There were four new CJIPs in 2025. Notably, in April of this year, France’s National Assembly aimed to abolish the CJIP in a vote to amend the law on social and tax fraud, a decision that did not survive reconciliation with the Senate version.
Among the reasons for this effort, according to Lana, is that some deputies viewed certain CJIPs as too lenient or granting excessive protection to the firm in question, and some believe that a CJIP is just a “behind closed doors” deal. However, she told me, an independent judge has to sign off on CJIPs (the so-called homologation process) to ensure that both the procedure of reaching agreement and the fine are sufficient. Not only is the expense of a trial avoided, she said, but what a company might pay under a CJIP – 30 percent of its average revenue from the past three years – far exceeds what might result from a trial. Thus, echoing other voices (like Transparency International-France), Lana called the CJIP indispensable internally, to France's ability to fight corruption and externally, to coordinate cross-border cases with other jurisdictions.
Governance, Democracy and Economic Development Expert