In many locales by law businesses are required to maintain certain sets of documents at their registered address. For example in the UK this includes at least the company articles of incorporation, although the list is more extensive than that. It's one reason many small businesses have their accountant as their registered address.
Private limited companies must keep some or all of their statutory records
at their registered office, unless they are stored at a SAIL address
instead. These include the certificate of incorporation, the memorandum and
articles of association and share certificates (if applicable).
Furthermore, the following records and registers, where applicable, must be
kept up-to-date and stored at the registered office or SAIL address for
inspection purposes:
Register of members.
Register of company directors.
Register of secretaries.
Directors’ service contracts.
Directors’ indemnities – security against liability claims or legal costs..
Copies of resolutions.
Minutes of meetings.
Contracts relating to purchase of own shares.
Documents relating to redemption or purchase of own shares out of capital by private company.
Register of debenture holders.
Instruments creating charges and register of charges
My presumption would be that the "raid" involved requesting their finance department furnish the inspectors with at the minimum whatever such documents are required to be held in France, and that such a "raid" would be standard practice at the onset of any tax investigation
There is really not much to sieze from an office like this, but I can assure you that the infosec and physical security teams test people on raid process and probably do such drills on at least a yearly basis. Basically how to hand over exactly as much as you are required to provide, shield the rest, and notify people upstream to start the internal side of the response process.
If this was an engineering office then there would be a lot more involved (making sure such a raid did not expose code or allow on-premise agents to access raw data that an engineer at that facility might otherwise be able to access for dev and debugging purposes, etc.) I think this is just a sales office really, so it is more symbolic than anything else...
Sales office or not, the important aspect of this raid is to gather business data, not technical data. And emails are probably the most important thing they are after.
