The French National Financial Prosecutor and the French Anticorruption Agency have released guidelines on the French deferred prosecution agreement, that offers a few welcome clarifications.

After years of debate on the compatibility of transactional mechanisms with the French culture of criminal prosecution, Article 22 of Law No. 2016-1691 of December 9, 2016 (Sapin 2 Law) introduced a procedure called Convention Judiciaire d’Intérêt Public (CJIP), a French version of the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA). Since the implementation of the Sapin 2 Law, six CJIPs have been signed and published. Four of them relate to matters of international or national corruption, whereas the other two concern money laundering and tax evasion cases.