P.A.C.T.E. Law
This brand new law, introduced in May 2019, provides French companies with the means to grow faster and better, thanks to streamlined legal framework.
01
OVERVIEW
Companies have long complained about the administrative burdens that made it difficult for them to start and grow. The Business Growth and Transformation Action Plan, aka PACTE, addresses this directly by lowering barriers to success and simplifying the current legal framework—covering a broad scope of issues running from the elimination of tedious paper applications to the lack of equity capital.
02
BENEFITS
The PACTE Act features six key measures to help start-ups. It:
- Simplifies the staffing thresholds and their corresponding regulations. There are currently over 199 thresholds based on a company’s staffing situation. With PACTE this number will be reduced to 3, making it easier for startups to focus on their main business activities instead of being sidetracked by administrative work.
- Reduces the cost of employee profit-sharing by 20% and eliminates the flat tax for on-profit sharing and participation for companies with less than 250 employees.
- Promotes crowdfunding by opening PEA-PME accounts for investments that come out of crowdfunding, like equities, fixed-rate bonds and mini bonds.
- Creates a legal framework for Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in order to attract innovators from around the world, and to protect against fraudulent crypto-asset bids.
- Smoothes the pathway for researchers that would like to start or join a company by simplifying the rules that currently separates the public scientific research domain from the private sector.
- Encourages the protection of companies’ industrial property by strengthening French patents, by introducing a new category of IP protection that is cheaper and faster to apply for, and by introducing a simpler filing for the infringement of IP.
03
MORE INFO
You can find a page about the Act on the website of the Economy and Finance ministries.
PARTNERS
