You live in London, New York, Amsterdam or Singapore, and the monthly reports from your French subsidiary make for grim reading. The bank balance no longer covers the supplier invoices due next week, wages are payable at the end of the month, the VAT return shows a balance to pay, and the French accountant uses a word you have never heard before: cessation des paiements, the legal state in which a company can no longer pay its due debts with its available cash. Your first reflex may be to wire more money from the parent company and hope the situation improves. That reflex is understandable, but under French law it can be the most dangerous option. Once cessation des paiements has occurred, the clock starts running: the manager has forty-five days to file a formal declaration with the court, and every selective payment, every late filing, every undocumented cash injection can later be held against the foreign director personally. This article explains, entirely from the point of view of a foreign owner or director who does not live in France, how to recognise the moment when the declaration becomes mandatory, how to file it from abroad without travelling to France, which procedure the court will open, and how to protect yourself against claims by the liquidator. French terms are translated as they appear: the greffe (the court registry), the Kbis (the official company identity certificate), the BODACC (the official gazette where insolvency judgments are published), URSSAF (the body that collects social security contributions), and the tribunal des activites economiques (the specialised commercial insolvency court, which in Paris has replaced the old commercial court for these cases since 1 January 2025).
I. Your French company cannot pay: how to declare cessation des paiements from abroad within 45 days
A. How to recognise cessation des paiements and file the declaration from abroad
French law defines cessation des paiements as the moment when the company can no longer meet its due liabilities with its available assets. The redressement judiciaire procedure is, in the words of the statute, open to any debtor who, being unable to meet its due liabilities with its available assets, is in cessation des paiements. The original French text states: “Il est institué une procédure de redressement judiciaire ouverte à tout débiteur mentionné aux articles L. 631-2 ou L. 631-3 qui, dans l’impossibilité de faire face au passif exigible avec son actif disponible, est en cessation des paiements.” Two words carry the whole test. The passif exigible means debts that are due and can be claimed immediately: overdue supplier invoices that are not disputed, wages payable, tax and social security arrears. A debt that is seriously disputed before a court, or for which the creditor has granted a payment delay, is not part of the due liabilities. The actif disponible means cash and usable credit lines: the bank balance, an uncashed bank cheque issued to the company, confirmed additional facilities granted by the banks, liquid funds contributed by a director or shareholder, and shareholder current-account advances that are neither blocked nor called in. Buildings, machinery, stock and receivables are not available assets, however valuable they look on the balance sheet. The statute adds an important safety valve: a debtor who shows that the credit reserves or moratoria granted by its creditors allow it to meet its due liabilities with its available assets is not in cessation des paiements. In the official wording: “Le débiteur qui établit que les réserves de crédit ou les moratoires dont il bénéficie de la part de ses créanciers lui permettent de faire face au passif exigible avec son actif disponible n’est pas en cessation des paiements.” For a foreign parent, this means that a documented, confirmed credit line or a written payment schedule obtained from the main creditors can keep the company outside cessation des paiements, while a vague promise of future funding from the parent changes nothing.
In practice, the test is run with the French accountant week by week: list every debt whose due date has passed and which no creditor has agreed to postpone, add up the cash and confirmed credit, and compare the two columns. If the first column is larger, the company is in cessation des paiements, even if the order book is full and the business could be profitable next year. The date on which this tipping point is reached matters enormously, because the court will later fix an official date of cessation des paiements, and that date determines which past payments can be cancelled and from when the director’s forty-five-day filing duty ran. Disputed invoices need careful handling at this stage. Putting a claim artificially into dispute to shrink the due liabilities does not work: the court looks at whether the dispute is serious, and an obviously tactical dispute is ignored. Conversely, genuinely contested claims, for example where the supplier delivered defective goods and the dispute is documented, are left out of the calculation. Tax and social security debts deserve special attention because they are almost never disputed successfully and URSSAF rarely grants long delays without guarantees, so they weigh heavily in the due-liabilities column for a foreign-owned company that has fallen behind on payroll charges.
Once cessation des paiements is established, the filing duty is strict. The law provides that the opening of redressement judiciaire proceedings must be requested by the debtor no later than forty-five days after the cessation des paiements, unless it has requested conciliation proceedings within that period. The official text reads: “L’ouverture d’une procédure de redressement judiciaire doit être demandée par le débiteur au plus tard dans les quarante-cinq jours qui suivent la cessation des paiements s’il n’a pas, dans ce délai, demandé l’ouverture d’une procédure de conciliation.” The declaration is filed by the company’s legal representative at the registry (greffe) of the competent court, and the detailed rules state that the request to open redressement judiciaire proceedings is filed by the legal representative of the legal person with the registry of the competent court: “La demande d’ouverture de la procédure de redressement judiciaire est déposée par le représentant légal de la personne morale ou par le débiteur personne physique au greffe du tribunal compétent.” The filing must include the annual accounts for the last financial year, a statement of due liabilities and available assets with a formal declaration of cessation des paiements, the company’s SIREN identification number, a cash-flow statement, and supporting documents listed in the regulation. The standard form is Cerfa No. 10530, and the official guidance for directors confirms the forty-five-day deadline and the filing with the court registry, as published on the public enterprise portal at service-public.fr: declaration of cessation des paiements.
A foreign director does not need to fly to France to comply. The declaration can be prepared with a French lawyer (avocat) and the accountant, signed by the legal representative, and filed at the greffe by the lawyer holding a written authority (pouvoir). If the director cannot sign in wet ink, a properly worded power of attorney allows counsel to file on the company’s behalf, and supporting documents in English should be accompanied by French translations so the court-appointed judge can work without delay. What the director must not do is nothing. Silence past the forty-five days is itself treated as a management fault in later liability proceedings, and it closes the door to the preventive track: conciliation proceedings are available to commercial debtors facing proven or foreseeable difficulty who have not been in cessation des paiements for more than forty-five days, in the words of the statute, “une procédure de conciliation dont peuvent bénéficier les débiteurs exerçant une activité commerciale ou artisanale qui éprouvent une difficulté juridique, économique ou financière, avérée ou prévisible, et ne se trouvent pas en cessation des paiements depuis plus de quarante-cinq jours.” Filing for conciliation within the window stops the forty-five-day clock and opens a confidential negotiation with the main creditors under a court-appointed conciliator, which for a foreign-owned company often produces a standstill agreement while the parent arranges refinancing. Missing the window means the only routes left are the public collective proceedings described below.
One warning dominates this phase: from the date of cessation des paiements, selective payments become legally fragile. The law provides that certain acts performed since the date of cessation des paiements are void, including all gratuitous transfers of movable or immovable property: “I. ― Sont nuls, lorsqu’ils sont intervenus depuis la date de cessation des paiements, les actes suivants : 1° Tous les actes à titre gratuit translatifs de propriété mobilière ou immobilière”. The same article voids payments of debts that were not yet due, payments of due debts made by abnormal means, and security granted for pre-existing debts during the suspect period. Concretely, a foreign director who, after the cash crisis has begun, repays the parent company’s shareholder loan ahead of local suppliers, grants the bank a new guarantee for an old overdraft, or transfers a company vehicle to satisfy one creditor, risks seeing each of those acts cancelled by the court at the liquidator’s request. The safe rule from the moment cessation is suspected is to stop all non-ordinary payments, document every remaining payment as part of normal business, and let the court-supervised procedure allocate the available cash. Continuing to trade is not forbidden, and paying new debts incurred for the continuation of the business during the observation period is allowed, but preferring one old creditor over the others is exactly what the nullity rules punish.
B. What the court decides after your filing: sauvegarde, redressement or liquidation
After the declaration is filed, the court summons the director, usually through counsel, to a hearing and verifies three things: that cessation des paiements exists, the date on which it began, and whether the business can be saved. Three procedures exist, and only one matches each situation. The sauvegarde (safeguard) procedure is for companies that are not yet in cessation des paiements but face difficulties they cannot overcome alone. The statute states that a safeguard procedure is opened at the request of a debtor who, without being in cessation des paiements, shows difficulties that it is unable to overcome: “Il est institué une procédure de sauvegarde ouverte sur demande d’un débiteur mentionné à l’article L. 620-2 qui, sans être en cessation des paiements, justifie de difficultés qu’il n’est pas en mesure de surmonter.” For a foreign-owned company that files early, before the cash runs out, sauvegarde keeps management in place under the supervision of an administrator and freezes creditor action while a safeguard plan is negotiated. Once cessation des paiements is declared, sauvegarde is no longer available, and the choice lies between redressement and liquidation. The redressement judiciaire (judicial reorganisation) procedure, described above, aims at continuing the business, maintaining employment and clearing the liabilities through a court-approved plan adopted after an observation period. The liquidation judiciaire (judicial liquidation) procedure is opened for any debtor in cessation des paiements whose recovery is manifestly impossible: “Il est institué une procédure de liquidation judiciaire ouverte à tout débiteur mentionné à l’article L. 640-2 en cessation des paiements et dont le redressement est manifestement impossible.” Its purpose is to end the business or realise the debtor’s assets through a global or separate sale of its rights and property. The official guidance pages describe each track in practical terms at service-public.fr: redressement judiciaire of a company and service-public.fr: liquidation judiciaire of a company.
For companies registered in Paris, the competent court is now the Paris tribunal des activités économiques, the specialised economic-activities court that since 1 January 2025 has replaced the Paris commercial court for preventive and insolvency proceedings. The public portal confirms that the commercial courts of twelve cities, including Paris, Nanterre and Versailles in the Paris region, became tribunals for economic activities for these cases. A foreign director whose French company has its registered office (siège social) in Paris or the inner suburbs therefore files at the greffe of the Paris economic-activities court, and the hearing takes place there, with counsel appearing on the company’s behalf. Practical consequences follow: the Paris court handles a very large volume of cases and expects a complete file at the first hearing, including the accounting documents, the list of creditors with amounts and due dates, the employment situation, and the cash forecast. An incomplete filing from abroad, with missing bank statements or unsigned accounts, causes an adjournment that burns two or three precious weeks. The judgment opening the procedure is published in the BODACC, the official gazette, which means suppliers, banks and credit insurers learn of the situation within days. Foreign owners sometimes discover the publicity shock when the French bank freezes the account on the morning the judgment appears. That freeze is normal: the bank must preserve the funds for the procedure, and day-to-day payments continue only under the control of the appointed administrator or liquidator.
The observation period that follows an opening of sauvegarde or redressement usually lasts six months and can be renewed, up to a statutory maximum. During this period, an inventory is drawn up, creditors declare their claims within two months of the BODACC publication (four months for creditors living abroad, which protects a foreign parent that is itself a creditor of the French company), the administrator assesses rescue options, and the court decides between a continuation plan, a sale of the business as a going concern (plan de cession), or conversion into liquidation. Employee claims for unpaid wages are advanced by the wage-guarantee fund (AGS, the Association pour la gestion du régime de garantie des créances des salariés), which then recovers from the procedure. For a foreign owner, two strategic points matter here. First, any new money injected after the opening judgment to keep the business running enjoys priority repayment over older debts if the plan fails and liquidation follows, provided the financing follows the legal formalities, so a documented post-opening loan from the parent is far safer than an informal pre-filing cash advance. Second, the parent company that holds claims against the French subsidiary, such as unpaid management fees or an outstanding intra-group loan, must declare those claims in the procedure within the deadline, exactly like any other creditor, or lose the right to be paid from the proceedings. Missing the claim-declaration deadline is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes foreign groups make, because the parent assumes its internal accounting is enough and learns too late that only a formal declaration (déclaration de créance) counts.
If recovery proves impossible, the court converts the procedure into liquidation judiciaire. The opening or pronouncement of liquidation carries an immediate legal effect that every foreign director must understand: the judgment opening or pronouncing judicial liquidation entails, as of right from its date, the divestment of the debtor from the administration and disposal of its property, in the official wording: “Le jugement qui ouvre ou prononce la liquidation judiciaire emporte de plein droit, à partir de sa date, dessaisissement pour le débiteur de l’administration et de la disposition de ses biens composant le patrimoine engagé par l’activité professionnelle”. From that day, only the court-appointed liquidator (liquidateur judiciaire) administers the company’s assets, collects receivables, sells the stock and equipment, dismisses the employees under court supervision, and distributes the proceeds among creditors in the legal order of priority. The director keeps no signing authority on the accounts, must hand over all accounting records, cash, and access codes without delay, and must cooperate with the verification of claims. Refusing to cooperate, hiding documents, or continuing to use the company account after the judgment exposes the director to personal sanctions examined in the second part of this article. The liquidation is closed when the assets are distributed or when there is nothing left to distribute (clôture pour insuffisance d’actif), and the remaining unpaid debts are then generally unrecoverable against the dissolved company, which is why creditors and liquidators turn toward the director personally.
II. How a foreign director limits personal liability when the French company goes bust
A. What the liquidator can claim against you: insuffisance d’actif and fautes de gestion
When the liquidation of a company leaves debts unpaid, French law allows the court, at the liquidator’s request, to make the directors pay the shortfall. The central provision states that where the judicial liquidation of a legal person reveals an insufficiency of assets, the court may, where a management fault contributed to that insufficiency, order that the amount of the shortfall be borne, in whole or in part, by all the directors, de jure or de facto, or by some of them who contributed to the fault. The official text reads: “Lorsque la liquidation judiciaire d’une personne morale fait apparaître une insuffisance d’actif, le tribunal peut, en cas de faute de gestion ayant contribué à cette insuffisance d’actif, décider que le montant de cette insuffisance d’actif sera supporté, en tout ou en partie, par tous les dirigeants de droit ou de fait, ou par certains d’entre eux, ayant contribué à la faute de gestion.” Three points in this sentence decide the fate of many foreign directors. First, both de jure directors (the president of the SAS, the gérant of the SARL, the board members named in the Kbis) and de facto directors (anyone who actually directed the company, including a foreign parent executive who gave binding instructions from abroad) can be targeted. Living outside France and never signing a French document is no shield if emails and board minutes show that the real decisions were taken in London or Amsterdam. Second, the liquidator must prove a specific management fault that contributed to the shortfall: continuing a loss-making activity with no prospect of recovery, keeping manifestly irregular accounts, diverting company funds, or filing the cessation declaration months late. Third, the same article contains a vital protection: in the case of simple negligence by the de jure or de facto director in managing the legal person, liability for insufficiency of assets cannot be incurred, that is, “Toutefois, en cas de simple négligence du dirigeant de droit ou de fait dans la gestion de la personne morale, sa responsabilité au titre de l’insuffisance d’actif ne peut être engagée.” Ordinary carelessness is therefore not enough; the fault must go beyond mere negligence. The action must be brought within three years of the judgment pronouncing liquidation, and the sums recovered are shared among all creditors.
The Cour de cassation, the supreme court for civil and commercial matters, polices these actions strictly, and two recent rulings set the boundaries every foreign director should know. In a judgment of 17 June 2020 (pourvoi No. 18-11.737), the commercial chamber quashed an appeal decision that had condemned a deputy managing director for late declaration, holding that the judgment ordering a director to bear all or part of the insufficiency of assets must specify how each fault found contributed to the insufficiency of assets. The official reasoning states: “Le jugement qui condamne le dirigeant d’une personne morale à supporter tout ou partie de l’insuffisance d’actif de celle-ci doit préciser en quoi chaque faute retenue a contribué à l’insuffisance d’actif.” In that case, the appeal court had blamed the director for a late declaration while counting as damage an increase in liabilities that had occurred before the forty-five-day filing period had even expired. The supreme court held that a fault which could not have existed before the expiry of the forty-five-day period running from the cessation date could not have contributed to liabilities already constituted at that earlier moment. The lesson for foreign directors is precise: a late declaration is punishable only for the aggravation of the shortfall that occurred after the forty-five-day deadline passed, not for the whole collapse of the company. In a second ruling of 13 April 2022 (pourvoi No. 20-20.137), the same chamber drew the line between fault and simple negligence, holding that where there is simple negligence in the management of the company, the director’s liability for insufficiency of assets is excluded: “Il résulte de ce texte qu’en cas de simple négligence dans la gestion de la société, la responsabilité du dirigeant au titre de l’insuffisance d’actif est écartée.” The director of a meat-trading company had been condemned for lack of vigilance in depending on a single customer that brutally ended the relationship; the supreme court quashed the decision because reasoning based only on a lack of vigilance cannot establish a management fault distinct from simple negligence. For a foreign director, this means that an unsuccessful commercial strategy, such as relying on one large French client, is not by itself a ground for personal liability, while acts such as siphoning funds, falsifying accounts, or deliberately ignoring the filing duty are.
Beyond money claims, the court can impose professional bans. The statute provides that the court may pronounce the personal bankruptcy of any director, de jure or de facto, of a legal person against whom one of the following acts has been established, beginning with having disposed of the legal person’s property as though it were his own: “Le tribunal peut prononcer la faillite personnelle de tout dirigeant, de droit ou de fait, d’une personne morale, contre lequel a été relevé l’un des faits ci-après : 1° Avoir disposé des biens de la personne morale comme des siens propres”. The following items on the statutory list include conducting commercial acts under cover of the company in a personal interest, using the company’s property or credit against its interests for personal ends or to favour another company in which the director had an interest, fraudulently keeping irregular or incomplete accounts, and, in some versions of the proceedings, failing to file the cessation declaration on time. Personal bankruptcy (faillite personnelle) bars the person from directing any business for up to fifteen years and is published. As an alternative, the court may pronounce a management ban: in the cases provided for in articles L. 653-3 to L. 653-6, the court may pronounce, instead of personal bankruptcy, a prohibition on directing, managing, administering or controlling, directly or indirectly, any commercial or craft enterprise and any legal person, that is, “le tribunal peut prononcer, à la place de la faillite personnelle, l’interdiction de diriger, gérer, administrer ou contrôler, directement ou indirectement” The public enterprise portal warns directors that filing the declaration beyond the forty-five-day period exposes them to such a ban. For a foreign entrepreneur who runs several companies across Europe, a French management ban can have cross-border resonance with banks and partners, so the stakes go well beyond the French subsidiary itself. Tax and criminal exposure can add to the picture: unpaid VAT and payroll taxes can trigger personal recovery actions against directors in specific cases, and fraudulent organisation of insolvency is a criminal offence, but those extensions require specific conditions and are handled case by case with counsel.
The position of the foreign parent company itself deserves a separate word. A parent that is a shareholder is normally liable only up to its capital contribution, but three exceptions regularly trap foreign groups. First, the parent’s executives can be reclassified as de facto directors of the French subsidiary if they issued detailed day-to-day instructions, approved every payment, and left the French manager with no autonomy; the liquidator then sues them personally under the insufficiency-of-assets action. Second, intra-group payments made during the suspect period, such as the sudden repayment of the parent’s current-account advance or the payment of inflated management fees just before the filing, can be voided or reclassified, and the parent ordered to return the money to the French procedure. Third, a parent that issued a letter of comfort or guarantee (lettre de confort, cautionnement) to the French bank or landlord will be called upon to pay when the subsidiary collapses, regardless of the insolvency proceedings. Each of these risks is manageable if the group keeps arm’s-length documentation: written service agreements with market-rate fees, which connect to the transfer-pricing discipline examined in our earlier analysis of deductibility and withholding on payments to a foreign parent, board minutes showing that the French subsidiary’s management kept real decision power, and a strict stop on intra-group repayments once cessation des paiements is suspected. Readers setting up their French presence from scratch will find the full formation sequence, from bank account to Kbis to VAT, in our pillar guide on setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, and the personal position of the director on pay, social security and liability in our guide for foreign directors in France.
B. How to defend yourself from abroad: documents, deadlines and appeals
The defence starts the day the cash crisis appears, not the day the liquidator’s summons arrives. Courts judge directors on documents, and a foreign director who can produce a complete paper trail is in a fundamentally stronger position than one who managed by phone calls. The file to build immediately includes the monthly cash comparisons showing when cessation des paiements actually occurred, the correspondence proving that disputed claims were genuinely contested, the written payment delays obtained from creditors, the bank letters confirming or refusing credit facilities, the board minutes recording that the situation was discussed and that counsel was instructed, and the proof that the declaration was filed within forty-five days or that conciliation was requested in time. Where the declaration was filed late, the file must show that the delay did not aggravate the shortfall, for example because no new significant liabilities were incurred during the excess period, echoing the supreme court’s reasoning that only post-deadline aggravation counts. Where the liquidator alleges continued loss-making trading, the file must show the recovery plan that justified continuing: confirmed orders, a refinancing term sheet from the parent, a cost-reduction programme, or an acquisition offer under discussion. A director who can show that continuation rested on documented prospects is arguing fault versus business risk; a director with no documents is arguing from memory against a liquidator with accounts.
Four procedural deadlines structure the defence and none of them waits for a foreign director to find French counsel. First, creditors resident abroad have four months from the BODACC publication to declare their claims, so a foreign parent that is a creditor must file its déclaration de créance within that extended period or lose its place in distributions. Second, the insufficiency-of-assets action is time-barred three years after the judgment pronouncing liquidation, which gives the director visibility on how long the risk lasts but also means the liquidator can prepare the case for many months before suing. Third, judgments opening, converting or closing the procedure can be appealed within short periods, generally ten days for the opening judgment by the parties concerned, so a director who considers that the court fixed a wrong cessation date must react immediately rather than waiting for the liability phase to dispute it. Fourth, the declaration of claims and the verification hearings run on the court’s timetable in French, and a director living abroad should give counsel a standing authority to receive procedural documents and to appear, because a missed summons can lead to a judgment by default that is far harder to overturn. Practical organisation matters as much as legal argument: designate one contact person for the French lawyer, the accountant and the administrator or liquidator, centralise all documents in one shared file, and keep every intra-group email that shows who actually decided what, since those messages will be examined if de facto management is alleged.
For directors based in Paris and the Ile-de-France region, the defence has a local dimension worth using. The Paris economic-activities court, the Paris greffe, the accountants, administrators and liquidators practising in the capital, and the English-speaking business lawyers all operate within a few metro stops of each other, which makes it possible to assemble the file, meet the administrator, and attend hearings through counsel without the director travelling. Hearings before the Paris court can often be prepared by videoconference with the lawyer, with the director appearing in person only when the court expressly requires it, for example at the opening hearing or when personal explanations are ordered. Documents in English, such as the parent company’s board resolutions approving refinancing, should be translated into French by a certified translator (traducteur assermenté) when they are filed with the court, because untranslated exhibits slow the case and irritate reporting judges. The Ile-de-France URSSAF office and the Paris tax office have dedicated units for insolvency cases, and negotiated schedules for the company’s arrears, while never guaranteed, are processed faster when the request arrives complete with the procedure references, the SIREN number, and the administrator’s contact details. None of this replaces the legal substance, but in a jurisdiction that handles thousands of cases a year, a well-presented, complete, translated file is itself a form of defence.
When the liquidator’s claim arrives, the substantive defences follow the structure of the statute and the case law. Against an insufficiency-of-assets claim, counsel will first check whether each alleged fault is precisely described and causally linked to a quantified aggravation of the shortfall, since the supreme court requires the judgment to specify how each fault contributed. A claim that lists grievances without quantifying their impact is vulnerable. Counsel will then test each fault against the simple-negligence shield: a wrong commercial bet, a missed market shift, or a lack of vigilance that never went beyond carelessness cannot support liability after the 2022 ruling. Late declaration is answered by comparing the cessation date, the expiry of the forty-five-day period, and the dates of the liabilities allegedly caused by the delay, following the 2020 ruling. Payments attacked as suspect-period preferences are answered by showing they were ordinary-course payments by commonly accepted means for debts that were due, rather than abnormal advantages granted to one creditor. Against a personal-bankruptcy or management-ban claim, the defence focuses on the exhaustive statutory list: each alleged act must fit one of the listed cases, with evidence, and the absence of asset-stripping, private use of company funds, or fraudulent accounting must be demonstrated document by document. Settlement should always be considered in parallel: liquidators often accept a negotiated contribution below the claimed amount when the director’s file is strong and the alternative is years of proceedings with uncertain recovery against assets located abroad, and a settlement recorded by the court closes the matter discreetly.
Conclusion
A French company that cannot pay its bills does not condemn its foreign owner, but it imposes a strict timetable and a paper discipline that leave no room for improvisation. Recognise cessation des paiements early with the accountant by comparing due debts against cash and confirmed credit, file the declaration or request conciliation within forty-five days through French counsel holding a proper authority, stop all selective payments from the moment the crisis is identified, and declare the parent company’s own claims in the procedure within the four-month period for creditors abroad. Before the court, push for the procedure that matches reality: sauvegarde if the cash still covers due debts, redressement with a serious plan if the business can be saved, liquidation without delay if it cannot, because a hopeless continuation financed by undocumented parent advances only enlarges the shortfall the liquidator will later pursue. As director, remember that only management faults that demonstrably aggravated the shortfall after the filing deadline engage your personal liability, that simple negligence is now a statutory shield confirmed by the supreme court, and that every defence depends on documents produced in French and on time. Prepared this way from abroad, with counsel appearing before the Paris economic-activities court and a complete translated file, the insolvency of a French subsidiary becomes a managed legal process rather than a personal trap, and the foreign director keeps control of the outcome instead of discovering it in a liquidator’s summons.
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