Atos Shareholders Seek Auditor Correspondence Ahead of Key Hearing

Institutional investors pursuing claims against Deloitte and Grant Thornton over their alleged role in the collapse of Atos’s share price are seeking access to documents held by the French IT group, including correspondence with its auditors concerning the company’s accounts. Atos is resisting the request, which is due to be considered at an upcoming court hearing.

The global shareholder action is being funded by IVO Capital Partners, bringing together institutional and national investors seeking recovery for losses linked to the decline of a company once valued at approximately $15 billion. We spoke to Sophie Vermeille, founder of law firm Vermeille & Co, who is representing current and former Atos shareholders, about the upcoming hearing, the documents being sought and the allegations against Deloitte and Grant Thornton.

1. What is the court being asked to decide at the upcoming hearing, and why are the documents sought from Atos important to the shareholders’ case against Deloitte and Grant Thornton?

The Versailles Court of Appeal is being asked to confirm a January 2026 order requiring Atos to hand over its internal accounting records and, crucially, its statutory auditors’ full reports and correspondence for the years 2018 to 2023. This is a French pre-trial evidence procedure (Article 145). The documents matter because they are the contemporaneous record of what the auditors examined, flagged and signed off on. They are the foundation on which the separate liability case against the auditors will be built.

Atos is resisting disclosure of correspondence with its auditors relating to the company’s accounts. What reasons has it given, and how do you respond to those arguments?

Atos principally argues that the requested material contains commercially sensitive information (secret des affaires) and that the request is disproportionate. It has also asked the court to stay the matter. Article 145 (France’s answer to “discovery”) exists precisely for situations like this: the law allows disclosure where there is a legitimate reason to preserve evidence for a future trial. Confidentiality concerns are managed through targeted, proportionate production, not by withholding everything. We are delighted that the first-instance judge has already accepted that our purpose for seeking the documents is legitimate and granted disclosure of most of what we sought. We are simply asking the appeal court to uphold that same decision.

2. What could the communications between Atos, Deloitte and Grant Thornton reveal about what the auditors knew, when they knew it and how they responded to concerns about the company’s financial position?

These communications will be crucial because they should show what the auditors knew, when they knew it, and how they reacted — the timeline is the heart of any audit-liability case. Exchanges with the audit committee and board, management letters and technical annexes typically record the concerns auditors raised internally, even when the published audit opinion says little. In short, they let us compare what was discussed behind closed doors with what investors were ultimately told. We of course cannot prejudge what those documents will contain; that is exactly why we are seeking them.

3. What is the central allegation against Deloitte and Grant Thornton, and how do you say their conduct contributed to the collapse in Atos’s share price and the losses suffered by institutional investors?

The allegation is that, as Atos’s joint statutory auditors, they certified the group’s consolidated accounts without qualification even though those accounts were, we allege, materially misstated — and that they failed to trigger the alerts required by law. Our case identifies four connected problems. First, goodwill and customer-relationship assets were over-valued: they made up the bulk of Atos’s long-term assets and at one point exceeded the group’s entire equity, yet were not impaired despite unrealistic cash-flow assumptions. Second, year-end “window dressing” of working capital artificially inflated the reported cash position by as much as €2.3 billion in 2022 through reverse-factoring and receivables arrangements not transparently disclosed to the market until October 2023. Third, revenue and contract assets on multi-year contracts were recognised too aggressively under IFRS 15, overstating equity. Fourth, litigation and onerous-contract provisions were understated and no going-concern warning was issued in 2020–2022, when the group’s true financial position was arguably far weaker than shown.

The alleged misstatements span the accounts certified from February 2018 to March 2024, so even the earlier years are in issue. But the allegations are most serious for 2022 and 2023 — the period when the distortions were largest and the crisis was imminent, before the crisis finally surfaced publicly. These are the allegations to be proven, and the auditors are entitled to the presumption that they acted properly until a court rules otherwise.

4. Atos was once valued at around $15 billion. Which accounting statements, audit opinions or market disclosures are most important to establishing whether investors were given a misleading picture of the company?

The most important items are the audit opinions certifying the 2019–2023 consolidated financial statements, and the accounting positions behind them — goodwill, working-capital requirements, contract assets and provisions — compared to the disclosures Atos actually made to the market. The question is whether the certified figures gave investors a fair and accurate view of the group's financial position.

5. What role has funding from IVO Capital Partners played in enabling institutional investors to pursue the action, and what features of the claim made it suitable for third-party funding?

Third-party funding provides the financial means: it allows hundreds of investors from around the world — who individually might be less inclined to finance years of complex proceedings in France — to pursue a single coordinated claim without having to duplicate the effort and costs of individual legal actions. All decisions relating to the conduct of the case rest with the legal team. The claim suits third-party funding because the alleged losses suffered by shareholders are significant and quantifiable, the defendants are solvent professional firms, and the underlying facts are well documented.

6. How difficult is it to coordinate a global shareholder action involving institutional investors across multiple jurisdictions, and what challenges does that create for case management, evidence gathering and damages analysis?

There is no choice of forum here: the issuer is French, its auditors are French, and jurisdiction lies exclusively with the French courts. The challenge is educational — bringing international institutional investors up to speed on recent developments in French procedure that, for the first time, make a case like this realistically winnable. The natural reference point is the Vivendi case, where institutional investors sued only the issuer and did not challenge the sincerity of the accounts themselves — alleging only misleading financial communication — and relied almost entirely on a regulator's decision. Atos is a materially different case, and the allegations are far graver: the challenge in this case is the sincerity of the certified accounts themselves. That makes it possible to build the case using court-ordered documents rather than borrowed regulatory findings, and to sue the auditors directly. Much of our work with institutional investors is to explain this distinction — and the evolution in judicial practice, which now allows this type of case to be handled more swiftly than in the past. The technical work of documenting each investor’s holdings and losses to a common standard is demanding, and we work with independent damages experts.

7. What are the possible outcomes of the hearing, and what practical effect would an order requiring Atos to produce the documents have on the progress and strength of the claim?

If the court of appeal upholds the decision to force disclosure, the documents will form part of the evidentiary record and the merits case against the auditors can move forward on firm factual footing. In any event, we will be able to obtain documents within the merits proceedings against the auditors themselves; we brought this pre-trial action against Atos to broaden the range of documents available.

8. What are the next major steps in the litigation, and when might investors expect substantive findings on the alleged responsibility of Deloitte and Grant Thornton?

The case has clear near-term momentum. The immediate milestones are the merits case-management hearing on 17 September 2026 and oral argument on the disclosure appeal on 30 September 2026, with the appeal ruling expected in the following weeks. We have already secured an early procedural win at the evidence stage — the January 2026 disclosure order — and substantive briefing on the auditors’ liability will move forward as soon as those documents are provided. In other words, this is not a case waiting in a queue: each quarter brings a concrete, scheduled next step, and the evidentiary foundation for the liability findings is being put in place now.