Behind the wall: an investigation into company and real estate ownership in...

Real estate in France, especially in Paris and the French Riviera, has long attracted criminals and corrupt officials.

From time to time, it is revealed that foreign politicians and businessmen allegedly involved in or convicted of financial crimes own luxury real estate properties in France.

At the start of the war in Ukraine, Kremlin-linked individuals reportedly owned French real estate worth more than 350 million euros.

It is extremely difficult to establish the involvement of suspicious persons in their assets abroad because they are almost never the direct owners of valuable assets, nor do they list them in their own name.

Instead, real estate ownership is almost always hidden through opaque corporate structures.

In principle, tracing potentially illicit financial flows into real estate should be possible in France, where public authorities collect information on the real owners of both companies and real estate.

This data has been publicly available since 2021, so activists and investigative journalists should be able to track the flow of money.

However, in fact, our report with Transparency International France, Transparency International and the Anti-Corruption Data Collective shows that investigations into money laundering through French real estate are doomed to failure.

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