French public registers useful to an investigation

A public register has three qualities no other source combines: it is official, it is dated, and it is enforceable. Information drawn from a register is not argued with the way a mention found on a website is.

This page lists the French registers most useful to an investigation, what each one actually holds, and what it does not. Addresses change and access regimes evolve: always check the official page before drawing a conclusion.

Companies

The company directory

The quickest way in. It aggregates a company’s identity, its establishments, its officers and its links to the other state services. That is where to start before paying for anything elsewhere.

It gives you the SIREN number, which is the key to every search that follows. Note it in your map from the outset: it is your best pivot.

Address: annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr

The national business register

Since 2023, the national register held by the French industrial property institute centralises the registration of French businesses, including those that previously came under the trades or agricultural registers.

It lets you retrieve identity data, officers, the corporate purpose and the filed documents. Part of it is released as open data.

Address: data.inpi.fr

The SIRENE directory

Held by the national statistics institute, it lists businesses and each of their establishments, with their activity and their date of creation or closure. This is the source for telling a company apart from an establishment, and for spotting an address hosting an unusual number of establishments.

It is published as open data, so it can be queried in bulk.

The commercial court registries

Registration extracts, articles of association, minutes of general meetings and annual accounts are filed there. It is the richest source for understanding an arrangement, because the articles say who decides what.

Beware of a limit that often surprises: small companies may request confidentiality for their profit and loss account, and micro-enterprises for their accounts as a whole. An absence of published accounts is therefore not a signal in itself.

BODACC

The official bulletin of civil and commercial announcements publishes incorporations, changes, business sales, insolvency proceedings and strike-offs. It is the tool that dates a change precisely.

Its strength is chronology. When you are trying to establish who ran what and when, BODACC settles it where a registration extract only gives you the situation as of today.

Address: bodacc.fr

Legal announcements

Before reaching BODACC, some events pass through an authorised journal. These announcements help when an operation is too recent to appear elsewhere.

Beneficial owners

The register of beneficial owners identifies the natural persons who genuinely control a company, beyond the interposed entities. That is often the answer an investigation into an arrangement is looking for.

Access to it has changed. In November 2022 the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the provision opening this register to the general public, on the grounds of a disproportionate interference with privacy. Access remains open to competent authorities and to entities subject to anti-money-laundering obligations. The press and civil society organisations have access on legitimate interest grounds, under arrangements that have continued to evolve since.

This is the point on this page that moves the most. Check the regime in force before building an approach on it.

Associations and foundations

The official journal of associations publishes the creation, modification and dissolution of associations under the 1901 law.

It gives the name, the declared purpose, the registered office and the date. It does not give the list of officers, which stays with the prefecture and is not freely distributed.

Alsace and Moselle fall under a separate regime, with an associations register held by the courts.

Address: journal-officiel.gouv.fr

Land and property

Property transaction values

The land value database lists property transactions from recent years: type of property, floor area, price, date, municipality and cadastral section.

It does not give the name of the buyer or the seller. It is a source of context and dating, not of identification.

The land registry

It gives the parcels, the boundaries and the buildings. The property statement, which ties a parcel to its owner, is not freely accessible and its release is regulated.

Address: cadastre.gouv.fr

Public procurement and decisions

Public contracts

The official bulletin of public procurement announcements publishes contract notices and awards. It is an efficient way to establish a commercial relationship between a company and a public body, with an amount and a date.

At European level, the supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union plays the same role for contracts above the thresholds.

Address: boamp.fr

Légifrance and the official journal

The legislation, but also appointments, honours, approvals and authorisations. Many investigations stall on a question of official role that the official journal settles in one search.

Address: legifrance.gouv.fr

The high authority for transparency in public life

Declarations of interests and assets by public officials, and the register of interest representatives. This is the source for tying lobbying activity to an organisation.

Address: hatvp.fr

Open data

The national platform gathers thousands of datasets published by public administrations, including several of the registers above in downloadable form. When individual lookups no longer scale, that is where to go.

Address: data.gouv.fr

Using them without getting lost

Start from the SIREN. Once you have that number, every other register can be queried cleanly. Without it, you will sooner or later confuse two companies with similar names.

Date every piece of information. An extract gives a situation at a moment. BODACC gives the change. Those are two different natures, and an investigation map should tell them apart in the names of its links.

Record the source in the entity. The register name and the date of consultation belong in the entity’s fields, not in your memory. That is what separates a defensible file from a conviction.

Be wary of shared addresses. An address common to five companies is often a registered-office provider, not a network. Draw the “located at” link without concluding, and look for what would confirm something else.

An absence is not proof. Unpublished accounts, an unlisted officer, an association with no entry: each can have a mundane explanation.

The framework

These registers are public, but the information they hold remains personal data as soon as it concerns an identifiable natural person. Collecting and keeping it constitutes processing, with the obligations that follow.

The guide on personal data sets out the legal basis, minimisation and retention periods. The most useful principle in practice fits in one sentence: only let into your map what answers the question you asked.