In a ruling on 02 February 2016, the Versailles Court of Appeal imposed several liability on both the publishing company Wolters Kluwer France (WKF) and its parent holding company Holding Wolters Kluwer France (HWKF) to recalculate and pay eight years worth of profit sharing amounts to the French employees that did not receive this element of pay because of a tax optimization scheme (where the subsidiary took out a loan from the parent leaving the subsidiary in debt). The Appeal Court stated that the management had ‘knowingly dissimulated’ the negative consequences of the scheme and called it unenforceable on the employees.
Wolters Kluwer France is well known to French readers because it edits the Lamy series and the Liaisons Sociales magazine, which specialize in labor law. During the summer of 2007 the French subsidiaries of the Dutch group WK merged and were then bought by a new entity called WKF. To bring about the new organizational structure, the parent holding company, HWKF, lent WKF €445 million over 15 years at higher than market rates, yet this was an intra-group financial operation. In the end this oper
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