Bibliographie sélective OHADA

The principle of independence of legal persons within corporate groups means that the rights and obligations of each company in the group are assessed individually, without taking account of the fact that they belong to the group. However, in terms of reporting obligations, the CSRD directive provides for a derogatory system of “consolidated sustainability reporting” for groups of companies. In essence, this requires the dominant company to provide sustainability information on behalf of all group companies under its control. This logic is not new, and has its origins in the system of consolidated accounts which, in terms of financial reporting, obliges the parent company to communicate on the financial position and results of group companies as if they were a single entity. This substantial approach to accounting law, which aims to communicate information that is useful for economic decision making, seeks to reflect the reality of transactions, beyond their legal form. From this point of view, the group is considered to be a single entity, due to the dominant company’s power of control over the resources of its subsidiaries. This logic has permeated company law, and the obligation to draw up consolidated financial statements is enshrined both in European Union directives and in the French Commercial Code. The legal basis for this is the control of the dominant company, i.e. the power of the parent company to impose its views on its subsidiaries at shareholders’ meetings, and to exert influence over the management of its subsidiaries. The consolidated reporting regime had been extended to non-financial information since the NFRD directive in 2014, at European level, and since the law of July 12, 2010, in domestic law. It is set out in Article 29 bis of the CSRD Directive, with a few changes. Consolidated sustainability information reveals an extension of the consolidation logic. Indeed, consolidated sustainability reporting requires the publication of strategic and qualitative information that goes far beyond the scope of financial data required for consolidated accounts. Moreover, unlike the obligation to draw up consolidated financial statements, the system provides for an exemption from the obligation to provide information, on an individual basis, at the level of each subsidiary, so that the obligation only weighs on the head company of the group. We have thus moved from a purely informative and descriptive consolidation logic to the obligation for the head company of the group to report on the environmental and social consequences of the activity of the companies in the group. As a result, the consolidation of information within groups obliges, to a certain extent, the head companies to assume the risks generated by the activity of all the companies included in the scope of consolidation and, above all, the measures implemented to deal with them. Stakeholders of the parent company or of one of the group’s subsidiaries will theoretically be able to have an overall view of the activities of the companies in the group, without the head company being able to conceal activities with harmful social and environmental consequences within a subsidiary. This is all the more true given that the scope of consolidation is broadly understood, since the consolidation thresholds are calculated and added up at the level of all the companies in the group, on the one hand, and that the CSRD directive provides for the inclusion of non-European parent companies which carry out an activity in the European Union through a subsidiary or branch, on the other. However, this observation must be tempered by the conditions under which the information obligation is implemented. Although the CSRD requires that information be traceable, this is hardly sufficient to ensure that the consolidated sustainability report remains comprehensive. The provision of global data on the environmental and social risks generated by the activities of group companies leaves considerable scope for concealing individual data, specific to the sustainability impacts of each subsidiary, and encourages deceptive transparency. It therefore seems essential to require that subsidiaries be exempted from the requirement to provide detailed information on a subsidiary-by-subsidiary basis, to ensure that the consolidated reporting system is not just a tool for optimizing information within groups.