France's Trust Ownership Registry

According to French law, as a trustee (officially referred to as an "administrator"), you may have a disclosure obligation to the French Tax Administration that involves two declarations:

• an annual declaration (2181-TRUST 2 Form) including an inventory of the net value of the assets and rights held by the trust;
• an event-triggered declaration (2181-TRUST 1 Form) filed upon the occurrence of special events related to a trust (constitution, modification and extinction).

For further information or detail about the declarations, please see our earlier posting "Trust filing duties under the French Tax Code". In this post we provide an update on the issue of public access to the registry maintained by the French Tax Administration.

The information contained in these declarations is recorded in a Trust ownership registry created by article 11 of Law 2013-1117 of 6 December 2013. This registry was previously not accessible to the public because no decree has been issued setting out process by which members of the public could access or consult the database.

This has now changed as the process for consultation of the registry has just been defined by a decree published on 11 May 2016.

The Trust ownership registry will be accessible to the general public via a website. The information which will be available is as follows:

• Name and address of the trust
• Date of constitution and date on which the trust is due to end.
• Identity of settlor, beneficiary and trustee

It should be noted that the user's ID, their IP address along with the date and the time of the request will be stored for one year in relation to each search made of this registry.

The launch of this database will be officially announced by the Finance Minister on 30 June 2016 and from this date the database will be publicly searchable (ann. II art. 368 and 368 A, I of FTC).