Anti-corruption in France: first AFA sanction and 2025 report

The French Anti-Corruption Agency (Agence française anticorruption, AFA) published its 2025 activity report in July 2026. Beyond its institutional review, the report contains a number of figures and trends that are directly relevant to companies and their legal and compliance departments: a sharp increase in reports received, continued recourse to the judicial public interest agreement (convention judiciaire d’intérêt public, CJIP), persistent weaknesses in anti-corruption programmes, and an expanded scope for Article 17 of the Sapin II Law. In the immediate aftermath of this publication, on 9 July 2026, the AFA Sanctions Committee issued its first decision imposing financial penalties on a company and its legal representative under the same Article 17.

As in previous years, the AFA’s activity report provides a useful stock-take of the Agency’s action and, more broadly, of trends in the prevention and enforcement of integrity offences. The 2025 edition comes against the backdrop of the adoption of an EU anti-corruption directive, the publication of France’s National Multiannual Anti-Corruption Plan 2025-2029, and the entry into force of the 13 June 2025 law aimed at freeing France from the grip of drug trafficking.

By decision no. 25-01 of 9 July 2026, published in anonymised form, the AFA Sanctions Committee imposed a financial penalty of €350,000 on a company and €60,000 on its legal representative, personally. Nine years after the entry into force of the law, these are the first financial penalties imposed on the basis of Article 17. The Committee’s two previous decisions had resulted, respectively, in no measure being ordered and in two compliance injunctions.

Following a control conducted from June 2024 to July 2025, seven of the eight obligations set out in Article 17, II were at issue: risk mapping, a code of conduct and related disciplinary regime enforceable against employees of a subsidiary, third-party due diligence, anti-corruption accounting controls, training for exposed personnel, and internal monitoring and assessment procedures.

Three points are worth noting. First, the AFA Director referred the matter directly to the Sanctions Committee for the purpose of imposing a penalty, without first seeking a compliance injunction, and the Committee upheld that choice. Second, the Committee held that the shortcomings were to be assessed at the date of the final control report, not at the date on which it issued its decision, rejecting the company’s argument that remediation completed in December 2025 precluded any sanction. Third, the legal representative’s personal liability was upheld, as the Committee noted that, as founder of the group, chairman and main shareholder, he had the authority and resources necessary to initiate compliance with the law, seven years after it entered into force.

As regards quantum, the Committee took into account the number, duration and seriousness of the shortcomings, but also the remedial measures taken since the control and mitigating circumstances in relation to two of the findings. The statutory caps are €1 million for legal entities and €200,000 for individuals. The decision may be challenged before the Paris Administrative Court by way of a full jurisdiction appeal within two months of notification.

The most striking figure in the 2025 report concerns reports received by the AFA in its capacity as an external whistleblowing authority: the number of reports nearly tripled in a single year, rising from 802 in 2024 to 2,257 in 2025. However, only 242 were admissible in 2025, i.e. 11% of the total, and these admissible reports overwhelmingly concern public-sector entities (76%), with economic operators accounting for only 19% of the organisations or individuals named. Of these 242 reports, 18 were referred to the public prosecutor under Article 40 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

In 2025, the AFA opened 10 new controls of economic operators, bringing the total number of controls conducted since 2017 to 175. The Agency’s director issued five formal warnings and referred one matter, concluded in the second half of 2025, to the Sanctions Committee. Recurring weaknesses identified include risk maps built around overly generic risk scenarios, codes of conduct lacking practical illustrations, third-party due diligence that remains insufficiently systematic, poorly defined anti-corruption accounting controls, and internal whistleblowing mechanisms that remain underused.

The report also devotes substantial attention to French subsidiaries of foreign groups, following the AFA’s follow-up review of nine such subsidiaries in the automotive sector. This review found that anti-corruption programmes were often closely modelled on those of the parent company without sufficient adaptation to the French legal framework. The Agency accordingly recommends that international groups implement a more granular, local adaptation of their programmes.

Author Credit: https://www.simmons-simmons.com/en/publications/cmrf0qk2q000ou5ncjvztvx8r/anti-corruption-in-france-first-afa-sanction-and-2025-report