You live in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore and you own shares in a French company. A buyer has appeared, or you simply want out, and you assume the sale will work like selling shares anywhere else: sign a contract, receive the money, walk away. In France, that assumption is expensive. Your sale can be blocked before it starts by an approval clause hidden in the statutes, it can be declared void after closing if you skipped a formality, and it can trigger French registration duties and a French capital gains levy even though you are not a French tax resident. The rules are also completely different depending on whether your company is an SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible joint-stock company most foreign founders choose) or an SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the closed limited liability company), and almost every step has to be handled from abroad through a representative, registered letters and electronic filings. This guide explains, in order, how you transfer SAS shares and SARL parts sociales (the units of ownership in an SARL, which are not freely negotiable shares) when you live outside France, what happens when the company refuses your buyer, who fixes the price when the parties disagree, and what you pay and file with the French tax administration before you can treat the file as closed.

I. How do you sell your shares legally when you live abroad: approval and paperwork in an SAS versus an SARL

The first question is never the price. It is whether you are legally allowed to sell to this buyer at all. French company law starts from opposite principles for the two vehicles foreigners use most: SAS shares are freely transferable unless the statutes say otherwise, while SARL parts sociales can only be sold to an outsider with the consent of the existing partners. Because you live abroad, you must run the whole approval procedure at a distance, keep written proof of every step, and understand that a refusal does not have the same consequences in an SAS and in an SARL.

A. How do you sell SAS shares from abroad when the statutes require prior approval?

In an SAS, freedom of transfer is the default rule and restrictions are purely contractual, meaning they exist only if the founders wrote them into the statutes. The most common restriction is the approval clause, and the Commercial Code defines it in one sentence: Les statuts peuvent soumettre toute cession d’actions à l’agrément préalable de la société. That sentence comes from Article L227-14 of the Commercial Code, and it tells you exactly where to look first. Before you negotiate anything, obtain the current, complete statutes of your SAS from the greffe (the clerk’s office of the commercial court that keeps the company register) or from the company, read every transfer restriction, and identify who grants approval, in what form and within what deadline. From abroad, this verification is usually done through your lawyer or accountant in France, because informal assurances from a co-shareholder that there is no problem with the buyer have no legal value.

The sanction for ignoring the clause is severe and automatic. Article L227-15 of the Commercial Code provides that Toute cession effectuée en violation des clauses statutaires est nulle. A void sale means the buyer is legally deemed never to have become a shareholder, the seller is deemed never to have left, dividends paid in between can be reclaimed, and votes cast by the supposed buyer at general meetings can contaminate every resolution adopted with his participation. For a foreign seller, the nightmare scenario is discovering the nullity two years later, from another continent, when a dispute breaks out over a capital increase or a dividend distribution. That is why the approval decision must always be secured in writing before the transfer is recorded, typically in minutes of a collective decision of the shareholders or a written consultation, and kept with the sale file.

The Cour de cassation, France’s supreme court for civil and commercial matters, clarified the exact scope of this nullity in a published decision of 21 June 2023, appeal No. 21-25.952, holding that L’article L. 227-15 du code de commerce ne régissant pas l’exclusion d’un associé ni la cession forcée de ses actions qui en résulte, la nullité qu’il prévoit vise uniquement à sanctionner la violation de toute clause statutaire ayant pour objet la cession d’actions librement consentie par leur titulaire (Cass. com., 21 June 2023, No. 21-25.952). In plain terms, the nullity punishes violations of clauses governing voluntary sales, which is precisely your situation as a willing seller, while forced transfers resulting from an exclusion procedure follow a different regime. Do not read this decision as good news: it confirms that an ordinary sale closed in breach of an approval clause is void, and the fact that you signed from abroad changes nothing.

Two practical traps deserve special attention before you sign. First, the majority needed to introduce or change transfer restrictions is itself locked by statute. Article L227-19 of the Commercial Code states that Les clauses statutaires visées aux articles L. 227-13 et L. 227-17 ne peuvent être adoptées ou modifiées qu’à l’unanimité des associés. Les clauses statutaires mentionnées aux articles L. 227-14 et L. 227-16 ne peuvent être adoptées ou modifiées que par une décision prise collectivement par les associés dans les conditions et formes prévues par les statuts. A buyer who asks you to clean up the statutes by removing the approval clause before closing cannot do it alone, and neither can a bare majority: check which majority your own statutes require for approval-related clauses, because the buyer will inherit the same constraint the day after he buys. Second, once approval is granted, the sale itself is completed by a transfer order, called an ordre de mouvement, signed by you or your attorney-in-fact and recorded in the company’s share movement register and in the individual shareholder accounts. Ownership passes through that registration, not through the private sale contract alone, so a seller living abroad should mandate in writing a person in France to sign the order, verify the book entries, and send back certified copies. Keep the signed order, the approval minutes and the updated account statements together: they are your proof of ownership transfer if the company later denies it.

One last preliminary check concerns your employees. Where the company has no works council and you are selling a majority stake, French law requires the seller to inform the employees of the planned sale so that they can, if they wish, submit a purchase offer. The rule sits in Article L23-10-1 of the Commercial Code, and the official service-public procedure for selling SAS shares describes the sequence: verify whether the information duty applies to your sale, inform the employees of the project, then collect any offers. The duty has conditions and thresholds, and not every sale by a minority shareholder triggers it, but skipping a mandatory information step exposes the sale to challenge. Ask your counsel to confirm, in writing, whether your transaction is caught before you notify the company of the project, because once employees are informed the timetable becomes rigid and the buyer will want the process closed quickly.

B. What happens when your SARL refuses to approve the buyer: can you still sell your parts?

In an SARL, the starting point is the reverse of the SAS: outsiders are suspects until approved. Family transfers remain free by default, since Article L223-13 of the Commercial Code provides that Les parts sociales sont librement transmissibles par voie de succession ou en cas de liquidation de communauté de biens entre époux et librement cessibles entre conjoints et entre ascendants et descendants. The same article immediately adds that the statutes may require approval even for a spouse, an heir or a parent, and that where approval is refused to an heir, the heir is entitled to the value of the deceased partner’s rights. Everything else, meaning any sale to a person outside the company, goes through the mandatory procedure of Article L223-14, and no statute can contract out of it.

The procedure of Article L223-14 of the Commercial Code is a timetable you must follow to the letter, ideally through a lawyer in France acting under a written power of attorney. First, Les parts sociales ne peuvent être cédées à des tiers étrangers à la société qu’avec le consentement de la majorité des associés représentant au moins la moitié des parts sociales, à moins que les statuts prévoient une majorité plus forte. Note the double threshold: a majority of the partners who together hold at least half of the parts, unless your statutes demand more. Second, Lorsque la société comporte plus d’un associé, le projet de cession est notifié à la société et à chacun des associés. Your notification must identify the buyer and the price; from abroad, send it by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt or through a commissaire de justice (the court officer formerly called huissier), and keep every receipt. Third, Si la société n’a pas fait connaître sa décision dans le délai de trois mois à compter de la dernière des notifications prévues au présent alinéa, le consentement à la cession est réputé acquis. Silence for three months equals approval, which is why proving the exact date of the last notification is decisive.

If the company expressly refuses your buyer, the statute does not leave you trapped: it converts the refusal into a forced buyout. Si la société a refusé de consentir à la cession, les associés sont tenus, dans le délai de trois mois à compter de ce refus, d’acquérir ou de faire acquérir les parts à un prix fixé dans les conditions prévues à l’article 1843-4 du code civil, sauf si le cédant renonce à la cession de ses parts. The cédant is the selling partner, and the article gives you a strategic choice many foreign sellers miss: you may renounce the sale altogether once you see the expert’s price, and simply keep your parts. The expert’s fees fall on the company, since Les frais d’expertise sont à la charge de la société. At the company’s request, a court may extend the three-month buyout period, but sans que cette prolongation puisse excéder six mois, and the company may instead, with your consent, reduce its capital and buy back your parts itself. A court can even grant the company up to two years to pay on proof of hardship, with the sums bearing interest at the commercial legal rate. If none of these solutions materialises in time, l’associé peut réaliser la cession initialement prévue: your original buyer walks through the door despite the refusal. Two limits frame the whole mechanism: l’associé cédant ne peut se prévaloir des dispositions des troisième et cinquième alinéas ci-dessus s’il ne détient ses parts depuis au moins deux ans, except in cases of inheritance, divorce settlements or gifts to close relatives, and Toute clause contraire aux dispositions du présent article est réputée non écrite. Any statute pretending to remove this exit is legally unwritten.

Once the sale or buyout is agreed, it must be made enforceable against the company and then against third parties. Article L223-17 of the Commercial Code sends you to the general rule by stating that La cession des parts sociales est soumise aux dispositions de l’article L. 221-14. That text, available at Article L221-14 of the Commercial Code, provides that La cession des parts sociales doit être constatée par écrit. Elle est rendue opposable à la société, dans les formes prévues à l’article 1690 du code civil. Toutefois, la signification peut être remplacée par le dépôt d’un original de l’acte de cession au siège social contre remise par le gérant d’une attestation de ce dépôt. Elle n’est opposable aux tiers qu’après accomplissement de ces formalités et, en outre, après publication des statuts modifiés au registre du commerce et des sociétés ; ce dépôt peut être effectué par voie électronique. For a seller abroad, the deposit route is usually the simplest: your representative files an original of the deed at the registered office (siège social) against a written deposit certificate signed by the gérant (the SARL’s legal manager), then the updated statutes are filed electronically with the registre du commerce et des sociétés (the trade and companies register kept by the greffe, whose entries appear in the Kbis extract, the company’s official identity card, and in the BODACC, the official gazette of commercial announcements). Until enforceability is complete, the company can lawfully keep treating you as a partner, convoke you, and ignore your buyer.

The Cour de cassation recently showed how protective this architecture is, including for heirs. In a published decision of 24 January 2024, appeal No. 21-25.416, it held that Il résulte de la combinaison des articles L. 223-13 et L. 223-14, alinéa 3, du code de commerce et de l’article 1843-4 du code civil, que l’héritier d’un associé décédé qui a demandé à être agréé comme associé au titre des parts dont il a hérité peut, à tout moment, même après la fixation du prix par l’expert, renoncer à sa demande d’agrément et exiger le remboursement de la valeur des droits de son auteur. (Cass. com., 24 January 2024, No. 21-25.416). The lesson extends beyond inheritance disputes: whenever the buyout price fixed by the expert disappoints you, the statute lets you walk away and keep your parts instead of selling at a price you never accepted. Foreign sellers should therefore never treat the expert’s figure as a forced sale price; it is the price at which the others must buy you out if, and only if, you confirm that you still want to sell.

II. Price, French tax and registration: what the foreign seller pays, files and updates

Getting approval, or surviving a refusal, is only half the transaction. The second half is money and paperwork: who determines the price when the parties cannot agree, which French taxes bite on a sale by a non-resident, and which registers must be updated before you can forget about the company. Each of these steps has its own deadline, and the tax cost differs sharply between SAS shares and SARL parts.

A. Who fixes the price when buyer and seller disagree: can the court-appointed expert ignore your valuation formula?

French law prefers agreement and organises disagreement. In both SAS and SARL sales, the parties first try to agree on the price, and only if they fail does an outside expert step in. The gateway is Article 1843-4 of the Civil Code, whose first paragraph provides that Dans les cas où la loi renvoie au présent article pour fixer les conditions de prix d’une cession des droits sociaux d’un associé, ou le rachat de ceux-ci par la société, la valeur de ces droits est déterminée, en cas de contestation, par un expert désigné, soit par les parties, soit à défaut d’accord entre elles, par jugement du président du tribunal judiciaire ou du tribunal de commerce compétent, statuant selon la procédure accélérée au fond et sans recours possible. For a seller living abroad, the concrete meaning is reassuring: if the remaining partners stall on price, your counsel petitions the president of the competent court in summary-like proceedings, an independent expert is appointed, and the resulting valuation binds the buyout. No appeal lies against the appointment order itself, which keeps the procedure fast.

The critical question is what the expert is allowed to do with the valuation methods the parties wrote in advance, for example a multiple of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) in a shareholders’ agreement. The Cour de cassation answered broadly in a leading decision of 24 November 2009, appeal No. 08-21.369, ruling that cette disposition, qui concerne tant les sociétés civiles que les sociétés commerciales, est applicable non seulement en cas de cession ou de rachat prévus par la loi ou par les statuts mais également en cas de cession ou de rachat prévus par des actes extrastatutaires et ce, quand bien même les parties auraient déterminé à l’avance les modalités de calcul du prix de la cession (Cass. com., 24 November 2009, No. 08-21.369). At the time, this meant the expert could be seized even where a private agreement already contained a price formula, and could value the rights without being chained to it.

You must read that 2009 solution together with the current wording of the statute, because Article 1843-4 has since been rewritten. In its present version, the expert appointed under the first paragraph est tenu d’appliquer, lorsqu’elles existent, les règles et modalités de détermination de la valeur prévues par les statuts de la société ou par toute convention liant les parties. The same duty appears in the second paragraph, which covers cases where the statutes organise a transfer without fixing any determinable value: the expert applies the valuation rules found in any agreement binding the parties. For your sale, the consequence is practical and double-edged. If your shareholders’ agreement contains a clear, applicable price formula, the expert must apply it, so draft or review that formula long before any dispute. If the formula is ambiguous, inapplicable to the situation, or manifestly designed for a different transaction, expect litigation over whether the expert was bound by it, and budget for that fight. In an SARL refusal scenario, remember the two financial cushions the statute already gives you: the expert’s fees are paid by the company, and the buyer side can obtain up to two years to pay with interest, which sometimes unlocks a buyout the remaining partners claimed they could not afford.

B. How much French tax do you pay as a non-resident seller and how do you close the file from abroad?

Every private deed transferring company rights must pass through French registration formalities, and the clock runs from the date of the deed. Article 635 of the General Tax Code (CGI, code général des impôts) opens with the rule that Doivent être enregistrés dans le délai d’un mois à compter de leur date the deeds it lists, which include share transfer deeds. Registration is not a mere stamp: it is the moment when the registration duty (droit d’enregistrement) is assessed and paid, and the tax administration publishes an online FAQ on declaring transfers of company rights explaining the electronic filing channel. A seller abroad almost always acts through a representative in France for this step, because the deed must be drawn up in writing with the mandatory particulars, filed on time, and accompanied by payment, failing which penalties and interest accrue against a person who may no longer have any French bank account to pay from.

The rate of duty depends on what you sell, and the gap between SAS and SARL is large. Article 726 of the General Tax Code states the principle that Les cessions de droits sociaux sont soumises à un droit d’enregistrement dont le taux est fixé as follows. For shares in joint-stock companies such as an SAS, the rate is 0.1 percent, since the article taxes at that rate pour les cessions, autres que celles soumises au taux visé au 2°, d’actions, de parts de fondateurs ou de parts bénéficiaires des sociétés par actions non négociées sur un marché réglementé d’instruments financiers au sens de l’article L. 421-1 du code monétaire et financier ou sur un système multilatéral de négociation au sens de l’article L. 424-1 du même code, which covers the ordinary unlisted SAS. For SARL parts, meaning rights in companies whose capital is not divided into shares, the same article imposes 1° bis A 3 % : – pour les cessions, autres que celles soumises au taux mentionné au 2°, de parts sociales dans les sociétés dont le capital n’est pas divisé en actions. Dans ce cas, il est appliqué sur la valeur de chaque part sociale un abattement égal au rapport entre la somme de 23 000 € et le nombre total de parts sociales de la société. Take a concrete example: 100 parts sold for 200,000 euros means 2,000 euros per part, minus an allowance of 230 euros per part (23,000 divided by 100), leaving a taxable base of 177,000 euros and a duty of 5,310 euros. Finally, sales of interests in real-estate-heavy entities bear 5 percent, because the article taxes at 2° A 5 % : – pour les cessions de participations dans des personnes morales à prépondérance immobilière. Before signing, compute the duty on your exact structure: a 3 percent charge on SARL parts routinely surprises foreign sellers who assumed the 0.1 percent share rate applied to everything.

Registration duty is only the first layer. If you are not domiciled in France for tax purposes, or your company-buyer vehicle has its registered office outside France, a specific levy can apply to your capital gain on a substantial stake. Article 244 bis B of the General Tax Code provides that les gains mentionnés à l’article 150-0 A résultant de la cession ou du rachat de droits sociaux mentionnés au f du I de l’article 164 B, réalisés par des personnes physiques qui ne sont pas domiciliées en France au sens de l’article 4 B ou par des personnes morales ou organismes quelle qu’en soit la forme, ayant leur siège social hors de France, sont déterminés selon les modalités prévues aux articles 150-0 A à 150-0 E et soumis à un prélèvement where the seller’s rights in the company’s profits, aggregated with those of spouse, ascendants and descendants, ont dépassé ensemble 25 % de ces bénéfices à un moment quelconque au cours des cinq dernières années. The rate of that withholding levy is fixé au taux prévu au deuxième alinéa du I de l’article 219 lorsqu’il est dû par une personne morale ou un organisme quelle qu’en soit la forme et au taux de 12,8 % lorsqu’il est dû par une personne physique. Sellers established in a non-cooperative state or territory face a far harsher rule: les gains mentionnés au premier alinéa sont imposés au taux forfaitaire de 75 % quel que soit le pourcentage de droits détenus dans les bénéfices de la société concernée, lorsqu’ils sont réalisés par des personnes ou organismes domiciliés, établis ou constitués hors de France dans un Etat ou territoire non coopératif au sens de l’article 238-0 A, subject only to proving genuine non-tax motives. Below the 25 percent threshold held over the last five years, this particular levy generally does not apply, but the applicable double tax treaty must still be checked line by line, because treaties allocate the right to tax capital gains between France and your state of residence and may require forms, certificates of residence and strict deadlines. Treaty analysis is not optional: it determines whether France taxes at all, and a foreign seller who ignores it may pay in France a levy his home country then refuses to credit.

Closing the file means updating every register that still shows you as an owner. If your sale changes who ultimately controls the company, the beneficial-owner register (RBE, registre des bénéficiaires effectifs) must be updated through the INPI Guichet unique (the single online company formalities portal run by the Institut national de la propriété industrielle), since a lapsed or inaccurate RBE entry can trigger a court injunction and, in the worst case, a strike-off procedure. In an SARL, the amended statutes reflecting the new allocation of parts must be filed with the trade and companies register, also via the Guichet unique, so that third parties can rely on them. Keep the full chain of evidence: sale deed, approval or refusal minutes with proof of notification dates, transfer order or deposit certificate, registration receipt, tax filings and the updated shareholder accounts. If you originally set up the company following our guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, treat this sale as its mirror image: every entry point you crossed on entry, bank account, Kbis, VAT number, beneficial-owner declaration, must be reviewed on exit so that no liability, fine or tax notice reaches you a year later at an address abroad where you thought the story was over.

Conclusion

Selling the shares of your French company from abroad succeeds when you respect the order of operations: statutes first, procedure second, price third, tax last. In an SAS, read the approval clause, secure the written approval before recording the transfer order, and remember that a sale closed in breach of the clause is void. In an SARL, notify the project to the company and to every partner, diary the three-month silence rule, and use a refusal as the trigger of a statutory buyout at an expert-fixed price that you remain free to decline. Where the parties cannot agree on value, the court-appointed expert values the rights under Article 1843-4 and must apply the valuation rules your contracts already contain, at the company’s expense in the SARL refusal scenario. On tax, register the deed within one month, pay 0.1 percent on SAS shares or 3 percent with the allowance on SARL parts, and test the substantial-stake levy and your double tax treaty before assuming the gain escapes France. Close every register behind you, from the trade and companies register to the beneficial-owner file. Handled in that order, from abroad and through a properly mandated representative, the sale leaves you with the price in hand and no French file still open in your name.

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