Kidnappings prompt company privacy reform

Company owners can now hide their personal address details in official registers following a spate of violent kidnappings. 

Cases to have hit the headlines this year include several involving high-profile cryptocurrency tycoons in France.

In one, the father of the founder of a firm making electronic safes to store cryptocurrencies had a finger cut off with secateurs and delivered through the post to his family.

Another case saw a Swiss citizen, who lived in France and had founded a cryptocurrency platform, abducted from his home and held for days before being rescued by gendarmes.

A government decree published in August, however, will make it harder for criminals to uncover the whereabouts of rich victims through company registers.

Business owners can now request to hide personal address details in the registre du commerce et des sociétés (RCS) and ask for them to be kept secret in the public description of the business required for its registration.

Personal addresses can also be hidden from the Kbis, the official public document which serves as proof of the judicial existence of a firm.

The request can only be made through the internet platform guichet des formalités des entreprises which, since 2023, has replaced the old department-based centres de formalités des entreprises (CFE). 

It will then be assessed by a greffier (court clerk) in your department’s tribunal de commerce within five days, according to a government statement outlining the procedure.

If no reply is received, you can make a formal request, which usually requires the services of an avocat, to the judge in the court charged with overseeing the register.

The addresses will still be visible to court staff, other officers and associates of the company, lenders, customs and tax officers, police, presidents of chambres de métiers et de l'artisanat and Mutualité Sociale Agricole (MSA), and Urssaf, the body charged with collecting social security contributions. 

A range of other official organisations, from the DGCCRF to notaires and even statistics agencies, will also have access.