Question 11939 — businesses

Summary

Mr. Philippe Juvin draws the attention of the Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industrial, Energy and Digital Sovereignty to the treatment of creative investments, commonly referred to as greenfield investments, within the framework of the control of foreign investments in France (IEF). The guidelines of the General Directorate of the Treasury relating to the IEF control procedure indicate in fact that the Operations consisting, for a foreign investor, of creating ex nihilo an establishment or an entity in France are not, as such, subject to the control system, while specifying that this may apply to subsequent operations carried out by the newly formed entity. At the same time, at the level of the European Union, the Commission presented, on January 24, 2024, the proposal COM(2024) 23 final aimed at strengthen and harmonize the screening of foreign investments within the Union. The general structure of this text explicitly makes it possible to understand creative investments among the operations likely to be examined, in particular when they concern sensitive capacities or activities. This results in a situation in which France appears, on this precise point, to be less competitive with regard to the orientation now promoted at European level. This situation is all the more paradoxical since, in the examination of certain files, the General Directorate of the Treasury requests the production of the notification form provided for by Regulation (EU) 2019/452, a form harmonized at Union level, which specifically includes sections relating to greenfield type investments. This results, at the very least, in a persistent gap between the French approach, mainly focused on acquisition operations and European orientation. Above all, the exclusion in principle of greenfield investments from the scope of IEF control is likely to constitute a major flaw in terms of economic security: a foreign investor can, in practice, establish in France, without prior authorization, a capacity or an activity relating to a sensitive sector, even if that the issues of sovereignty, business continuity or control of critical technologies can be comparable to those raised by an acquisition operation. Therefore, while the negotiations resulted, on December 11, 2025, in a provisional political agreement between the Council and the European Parliament on the revision of the foreign investment screening framework, establishing a substantial strengthening of the European system, he asks whether the Government intends to maintain the current doctrine excluding greenfield investments from IEF control or whether it plans, on the contrary, to develop the applicable framework in order to allow, when a creation project concerns a sensitive activity or capacity, a prior examination, in particular by adapting the regulatory definition of the notion of "investment".

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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