You wired 40,000 euros from London, New York or Dubai to keep your French SAS alive, the accountant booked it as a shareholder current account, and two years later you wonder how to get that money back while you live abroad. The compte courant d’associé, the shareholder current account, is the most common way foreign founders fund a French company, and also the most misunderstood. It is not equity, it is not a gift, and it is not automatically available whenever you ask. Handled well, it lets you inject cash in days, earn interest, and withdraw the funds with a simple bank transfer. Handled badly, it triggers a tax reassessment, a null loan, a frozen claim in an insolvency, or a dispute with the bank that financed the company. This article explains, for a foreign shareholder living outside France, when you can demand repayment of your compte courant from a French SAS, which agreements can lawfully delay that repayment, how interest is taxed on both sides of the Channel or the Atlantic, and which documents you must hold to defend the advance before the French tax administration (administration fiscale) and the commercial court (tribunal de commerce). Every French acronym is explained, every key rule is linked to its official text, and the reasoning follows a recent Paris Court of Appeal decision that refused repayment of a blocked current account.
I. When Can a Foreign Shareholder Living Abroad Demand Repayment of His Compte Courant From a French SAS?
A. Can You Ask for Your Money Back at Any Time, Even After Leaving France or Losing Your Shares?
Yes, as a starting point. French courts treat an advance booked in a shareholder current account as a loan (prêt) made by the shareholder to the company. The Paris Court of Appeal restated the principle in plain terms in a decision of 15 May 2025 concerning a blocked shareholder account: “Il est de principe que la qualification de prêt autorise l’associé ayant consenti une avance en compte-courant à décider librement du moment où il entend en réclamer le remboursement.” In other words, the shareholder who funded the company through his current account freely decides when to claim repayment, and the company cannot impose a waiting period that was never agreed. That ruling, issued by Pôle 5, Chambre 9 under reference RG 24/05837 and published on the official database of French case law (Paris Court of Appeal, 15 May 2025, RG 24/05837), is the backbone of this article, and its limits matter as much as its principle.
The practical consequence for a founder based abroad is straightforward. You do not need to travel to France, attend a shareholders meeting (assemblée générale), or hold a French residence permit to demand repayment. A written demand sent to the registered office (siège social) of the company suffices: an email followed by a registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt (lettre recommandée avec accusé de réception) creates proof of the date of your claim. From that date, late interest (intérêts moratoires) at the statutory rate (taux d’intérêt légal) runs in your favour if the company delays payment without justification, as the Evry commercial court illustrated by awarding such interest from the formal demand in the very case the Paris court later reviewed. Keep the bank statements showing the original transfer from your foreign account, because the company or a future liquidator may ask you to prove that the credit balance really comes from your funds and not from unexplained cash.
Two time limits frame your action. First, the general five-year limitation period (prescription quinquennale) applies to personal and movable claims: “Les actions personnelles ou mobilières se prescrivent par cinq ans à compter du jour où le titulaire d’un droit a connu ou aurait dû connaître les faits lui permettant de l’exercer” (Civil Code, article 2224). Since a current account repayable on demand becomes due when you demand it, waiting too long after a clear refusal can extinguish the claim, so a founder who receives an evasive answer should issue a formal demand rather than let months pass. Second, interest on interest, known as capitalisation or anatocisme, is only available for interest due for at least one full year and only if the contract provides for it or a court orders it: “Les intérêts échus, dus au moins pour une année entière, produisent intérêt si le contrat l’a prévu ou si une décision de justice le précise” (Civil Code, article 1343-2). If your advance agreement says nothing about compounding, do not assume that three years of unpaid interest automatically snowball.
One question returns in almost every foreign-founder file: does selling your shares or resigning as president (président) of the SAS destroy the right to repayment? No. The claim belongs to you as a lender, not as a shareholder, and it survives the transfer of your shares unless the sale contract expressly assigns the current account to the buyer. In practice, share purchase agreements routinely include a clause by which the seller assigns his current account to the buyer for one euro or for its nominal value, precisely because the default rule would otherwise leave the buyer facing a repayment claim the day after closing. Read that clause before signing: if you sell your SAS shares without reserving the current account in writing, you may have given away your 40,000 euros with the shares. Conversely, if you remain a shareholder but resign from management, nothing in the statutes of an SAS can force you to leave the money in place unless you signed a specific blocking commitment, which leads to the second half of this section.
A final warning concerns direction. Everything above assumes you lent money to the company. The reverse, the company lending money to you as an individual director or shareholder, is strictly forbidden and void. For the SAS, the Commercial Code provides that “Les interdictions prévues à l’article L. 225-43 s’appliquent, dans les conditions déterminées par cet article, au président et aux dirigeants de la société” (Commercial Code, article L. 227-12), and the referenced text states that “A peine de nullité du contrat, il est interdit aux administrateurs autres que les personnes morales de contracter, sous quelque forme que ce soit, des emprunts auprès de la société, de se faire consentir par elle un découvert, en compte courant ou autrement” (Commercial Code, article L. 225-43). The parallel prohibition for the SARL, the limited liability company with a manager (gérant), uses nearly identical words (Commercial Code, article L. 223-21). A debit balance in your current account, meaning the company owes you nothing and you owe the company, exposes you to a nullity action, a liability claim, and a tax reassessment treating the funds as disguised salary or dividends. Never use your compte courant as a personal overdraft facility.
B. Which Agreements Can Lawfully Freeze Your Money: Blocking Commitment, Bank Pledge and Insolvency Proceedings?
The same Paris decision immediately limits the principle: the court added that the articles of association or the current account agreement may impose a specific procedure governing a shareholder claim for repayment. The articles of association (statuts) or the current account agreement may impose a specific procedure for repayment claims. And the court added the decisive sentence for founders who signed papers at the bank counter: “Par la convention de blocage, dès lors qu’elle est valide et clairement exprimée les fonds, sont stabilisés dans la société pour une durée déterminée.” A valid and clearly worded blocking agreement (convention de blocage) stabilises the funds inside the company for a fixed period. In that case, the outcome was stark: in the operative part of the judgment, the court rejected the former shareholder claim for repayment of his 30,000 euro current account balance (Paris Court of Appeal, 15 May 2025, RG 24/05837). The shareholder had blocked 30,000 euros for four years until 28 February 2026 at the request of the lending bank, and the court enforced the lock even after he had been removed from management and claimed he was no longer a shareholder.
Three locks deserve your attention before you wire funds or claim them back. The first is the blocking agreement itself, often signed when the company borrows from a French bank. The bank (banque) conditions its professional loan (prêt professionnel) on the shareholders leaving their advances in place for the duration of the loan, typically through a side letter by which each shareholder undertakes not to demand repayment and sometimes assigns the account as security. From abroad, founders frequently sign these documents without reading them, because the bank emails a French-language pack the day before disbursement. Ask for three facts before signing: the exact end date of the block, whether early repayment requires the written consent of both the company and the bank, and whether the block survives a sale of your shares or your resignation. If the agreement says the funds are blocked until a fixed date, a court will enforce that date, as the Paris ruling demonstrates, even if you argue that you signed only in your capacity as shareholder and have since left the company.
The second lock is the pledge (nantissement) of the current account balance to the bank. A shareholder may pledge the balance of his account to a credit institution, but the Civil Code surrounds that security with strict formalities: “A peine de nullité, le nantissement de créance doit être conclu par écrit” (Civil Code, article 2356), and “Pour être opposable au débiteur de la créance nantie, le nantissement de créance doit lui être notifié ou ce dernier doit intervenir à l’acte. A défaut, seul le constituant reçoit valablement paiement de la créance” (Civil Code, article 2362). Concretely, if the pledge was never notified to the company or signed by it, the company still validly pays you, and the bank cannot complain afterwards. If the pledge was properly notified, only the secured creditor, the bank, can collect, and your repayment claim hits a wall until the secured loan is repaid. Founders living abroad should therefore request from the company a copy of any pledge notification bearing a date and a signature, and check who countersigned it. An incomplete document, which the evicted shareholder in the Paris case unsuccessfully invoked, will not defeat a bank holding three consistent signed commitments, so verify the paperwork before litigating.
The third lock is collective and heavier: insolvency proceedings (procédure collective). From the day the company enters safeguard (sauvegarde), judicial reorganisation (redressement judiciaire) or liquidation (liquidation judiciaire), individual repayment claims are frozen and each creditor must declare (déclarer sa créance) its claim to the court-appointed representative within two months of publication in the official bulletin of civil and commercial announcements (BODACC, Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales), with an extra two months for creditors living abroad. A shareholder current account is an unsecured claim (créance chirographaire), paid after employees, the tax authorities and secured banks, which in practice often means a fraction of the balance or nothing. Worse, demanding and obtaining repayment in the months before the opening judgment can be attacked as a payment during the suspect period (période suspecte) if the company had already stopped paying its debts (cessation des paiements), and a director who empties the company to repay his own account while suppliers go unpaid exposes himself to an action for the shortfall in assets (action en responsabilité pour insuffisance d’actif): “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” (Commercial Code, article L. 651-2). The mirror duty is to file for insolvency within forty-five days of the cash-flow insolvency: “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” (Commercial Code, article L. 631-4). If the company you funded from abroad is sliding towards insolvency, claim through the proceedings with a proof of transfer, and never arrange a quiet wire to yourself the week before the filing.
II. How Much Does Your Compte Courant Cost, and Which Documents Protect You Before the Tax Office?
A. Will the Interest You Charge Your French Company Survive a Tax Audit on Both Sides?
Interest turns a friendly advance into a priced loan, and that price is examined twice: once in France as a deduction claimed by the company, and once in your country of residence as income you received. On the French side, the starting rule looks generous: “Le bénéfice net est établi sous déduction de toutes charges” (General Tax Code, article 39), meaning net profit is computed after deducting all expenses. But the same article caps interest paid to shareholders by reference to an official average rate (taux moyen) published quarterly by the tax administration, based on variable-rate loans granted by banks to companies. Interest above that rate is added back to taxable profit during a tax audit (contrôle fiscal), producing additional corporate income tax (impôt sur les sociétés) plus late-payment interest and penalties. Since 2024 the standard corporate rate is 25 percent, so every euro of disallowed interest costs roughly twenty-five cents of tax before penalties. If the lender is not you personally but your foreign parent company, a second ceiling applies under the thin-capitalisation rules: interest on sums left at the disposal of a company by a related company is deductible only within the limits and conditions of the statute (General Tax Code, article 212), with excess interest partly carried forward and partly lost. Founders who control the French SAS through a UK limited company, a US LLC or a Dubai holding must therefore document that the interest rate matches what an independent bank would have charged, keep the loan agreement, and check the published quarterly rate before booking the charge.
On your side as an individual lender living abroad, France generally claims a withholding tax (retenue à la source) on interest paid by a French company to a non-resident. The mechanism sits in two provisions you will see cited in every reclaim file: interest and similar income paid to persons without a French tax domicile fall within the withholding system for investment income (General Tax Code, article 125 A), and French-source investment income paid to non-residents gives rise to a withholding tax at the statutory rate (General Tax Code, article 119 bis). The rate, the paying agent’s reporting on the annual investment-income return (IFU, imprimé fiscal unique), and the treaty reduction depend on the double-tax treaty (convention fiscale) between France and your state of residence: many treaties reduce French withholding on interest to 10 percent or zero for beneficial owners, but the reduction requires a residence certificate (attestation de résidence fiscale) delivered to the French payer before the payment, not a reclaim letter sent a year later. Without that certificate, the company must withhold at the domestic rate and you must claim a refund from the French tax office for non-residents (Service des impôts des particuliers non-résidents), a procedure measured in months. Coordinate with the accountant (expert-comptable) before the first interest payment, not after: the calendar of a French company, with its annual meeting to approve the accounts within six months of year-end and its corporate filings at the commercial court registry (greffe du tribunal de commerce), is described in our guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, from bank account and Kbis extract to VAT and first hire, and the interest workflow should be scheduled alongside those deadlines.
Three drafting choices decide whether the interest survives scrutiny. First, put the rate in writing before the funds move, ideally in a current account agreement (convention de compte courant) signed by both sides, stating the principal, the rate by reference to the published average rate or a fixed percentage below it, the payment dates, and the absence of compounding unless you want it. A rate added orally a year later looks like a backdated justification to an auditor. Second, pay the interest through the banking system with a labelled transfer (virement libellé intérêts compte courant), never in cash and never by netting it silently against new advances, because netting destroys the audit trail. Third, declare consistently: the company deducts what it actually paid within the legal ceiling, reports the withholding on the IFU, and you declare the gross interest in your state of residence while claiming the treaty credit. Good faith performance is not a slogan in French contract law but a public-policy duty, “Les contrats doivent être négociés, formés et exécutés de bonne foi. Cette disposition est d’ordre public” (Civil Code, article 1104), and an auditor who finds a written agreement, bank wires and matching returns on both sides rarely recharacterises the interest as a disguised dividend (distribution occulte).
B. How Do You Document the Advance From Abroad So the Auditor, the Bank and the Court Accept It?
Paper wins these files. A shareholder current account with no agreement, no transfer proof and no corporate approval is treated by auditors as unexplained money and by courts as a fragile claim, while a documented advance survives audits, bank reviews and shareholder disputes. Build the file in this order, entirely from abroad if needed, since every step can be done by email and videoconference with electronic signature, which French law accepts for these documents.
Start with the corporate authorisation. In an SAS, any agreement between the company and one of its executives, or a shareholder holding more than 10 percent of voting rights, follows the regulated-agreements procedure (procédure des conventions réglementées): “Le commissaire aux comptes ou, s’il n’en a pas été désigné, le président de la société présente aux associés un rapport sur les conventions intervenues directement ou par personne interposée entre la société et son président, l’un de ses dirigeants, l’un de ses actionnaires disposant d’une fraction des droits de vote supérieure à 10 %” (Commercial Code, article L. 227-10). A current account advance from a foreign majority shareholder falls squarely in that category when it carries interest or special terms, and even an interest-free advance is safer with a written report and a shareholders vote recorded in the minutes register (registre des décisions). In a single-shareholder SAS (SASU, société par actions simplifiée unipersonnelle), the same article requires only an entry in the decision register, which takes five minutes and proves the date and amount. In an SARL the parallel rule requires a report to the meeting with the interested shareholder excluded from the vote (Commercial Code, article L. 223-19). Skipping this step does not void the advance, unapproved agreements still produce their effects, but it shifts liability onto the interested person if the company suffers harm, and an auditor reads the absence of minutes as a governance failure.
Continue with the money trail. Keep the SWIFT message or bank advice for the original transfer showing your name as sender, the company as beneficiary, and a reference such as shareholder advance, because the Kbis extract (extrait Kbis, the official identity card of the company issued by the commercial court registry) proves the company exists but proves nothing about your payment. Reconcile the company ledger (grand livre) account 455, the balance-sheet line for shareholder current accounts, with your own statements every year-end, and have the accountant confirm the balance in the annual accounting package (liasse comptable). If the company repays you, mirror the discipline: board or shareholder decision noting the repayment, bank transfer with a clear label, updated ledger, and, where a blocking agreement existed, the written consent of the bank lifting the block. Founders who move money between personal and company accounts with vague references such as transfer or internal create the exact files that end in reassessment, because neither the auditor nor the judge can distinguish a loan repayment from hidden salary.
Finish with the social and registration checks that foreign founders forget. A shareholder advance is not salary, so no payroll declaration (DSN, déclaration sociale nominative) and no social contributions to URSSAF (URSSAF, the body collecting social security contributions) attach to the principal or to market-rate interest, but recharacterised interest becomes a distribution with dividend treatment, and disguised remuneration attracts both tax and social charges. Registration with the commercial court registry is not required for the agreement itself, unlike amendments to the articles which must be filed at the single company counter (Guichet unique, the online filing portal operated with the INPI, the French intellectual property and business-registry institute), yet the annual accounts filed at the registry (greffe) must show the current account balance consistently year after year. Finally, if you act through a foreign company rather than personally, confirm that the French beneficial-ownership register (RBE, registre des bénéficiaires effectifs) correctly identifies the ultimate individual, since banks now freeze disbursements when the register and the loan file disagree. None of these steps requires living in France; all of them require doing things in writing, in order, and before the dispute arises.
Conclusion
A shareholder current account remains the fastest tool for funding a French SAS from abroad, but speed is not informality. Demand repayment in writing and in time, because the five-year limitation runs and compounding requires a clause or a court order. Respect the locks you signed, because a clearly worded blocking agreement or a notified pledge defeats even a legitimate repayment claim, as the Paris Court of Appeal showed by rejecting a 30,000-euro claim tied until 2026. Price interest below the published ceiling, secure the treaty certificate before the first payment, and build the file, agreement, regulated-agreement report, bank wires and matching tax returns, before the auditor asks. With those disciplines, the money you wired from abroad comes home on a simple transfer, documented, deductible within limits, and defensible on both sides of the border.