The half-year consolidated financial statements are presented to the Audit Committee and then approved by the Board of Directors. The annual consolidated financial statements are reviewed by the Audit Committee, then closed at 31 December of the fiscal year by the Board of Directors and lastly approved by the Shareholders’ Meeting.
Each half-yearly and annual closing gives rise to the preparation of instructions specifying the main deliverables expected from each party involved in the publication of the financial statements as well as the preparation of the management report and the Universal Registration Document (URD) for the annual financial statements. Meetings with EDF departments and the subsidiaries facilitate the preparation of these financial statements and make it possible to anticipate changes with regard to certain treatments, thereby increasing the reliability of the accounting and financial information published. An analysis of the conditions concerning completion of the foregoing (compliance with deadlines, quality of information, etc.) after the event allows for regular improvement of the process to prepare and analyse the consolidated financial statements.
Quarterly reporting of information on the EDF group’s balance sheet and the profit and loss statement allows for the processing of complex operations to be anticipated and contributes to making the results more reliable.
Forecasts and management are performed using a single reference framework and tools shared between accounting and management. This system contributes to the coherence of Group management and facilitates dialogue at all levels of the organisation, and helps promote the sharing of information between the different parties and the quality of the information produced.
The corporate financial statements are prepared annually and semi-annually by the Parent Company Financial Statements Department of the Accounting Consolidation Division. The annual corporate financial statements are closed on 31 December of the fiscal year, approved by the Board of Directors of EDF and then approved by the Shareholders’ Meeting.
The condensed half-year corporate financial statements are closed on 30 June of the fiscal year, then approved by the Board of Directors. EDF’s transactional accounting (excluding the Nuclear Fuel Division, the Island Energy Systems Division, the Decommissioning and Waste Projects Division and the Executive Talents Training Managers Department for the payroll accounting aspect) is entrusted to the Shared Accounting and Consulting Services Centre (CSP2C) of the Tertiary Services Department, which also handles the transactional accounting for certain French subsidiaries. The treatment of transactional accounting is organised by process. “Governance pacts” set the respective responsibilities of the operational and functional departments, of the CSP2C or, where applicable, the accounting operators in the operational business lines and the Accounting Consolidation Division.
Meetings are organised on a quarterly basis with EDF’s departments to prepare the financial statements and anticipate changes with regard to certain treatments to increase the reliability of the accounting and financial information published.
Like the Covid pandemic, natural disasters (floods, landslides, earthquakes, etc.), significant climatic variations (droughts, etc.) and any other event the scope of which is difficult to predict (pandemic, a major industrial accident in the world, etc.) could affect the Group’s activities; this was the case with the storms Amelie (2019), Alex (2020) in metropolitan France, and Irma (2017) in the West Indies, and with episodes of extreme cold (winter 2017) and heat waves (summer 2019). In the event of an exceptional incident, the measures adopted may generate costs beyond those of repairing the damage caused by the disaster and the loss of earnings from the interruption of the goods and services provided by the Group.
To manage this risk, EDF has defined a Crisis Management and Business Continuity policy that takes into account the Group’s territorial presence and the importance of the Group’s industrial activities and public service to the economy in terms of business continuity. This policy defines the organisation principles and specifies the entire system that must be implemented. This policy consists in particular of:
A crisis exercise programme allows for the effectiveness and overall consistency of these mechanisms to be tested on a regular basis.
In 2019, the EDF group set up an action plan to increase the entities’ preparedness with regard to business continuity issues: in this context, the development of a pandemic crisis exercise, including the revision of the EDF group’s pandemic plan, was initiated in the summer of 2019. This work proved to be particularly useful for the management of the Covid crisis in 2020. By relying on operational, prepared and tested mechanisms, the EDF group was able to proactively and with foresight face the health crisis as from the end of January 2020.
Feedback after the summer of 2020 enabled the Group to approach the second lockdown with the lessons learned required to continue its activity.
The year 2021 tested the robustness of the crisis mechanism and its agility in the face of the different phases of lockdown and changing telework conditions during the Covid crisis. Finally, special attention was paid to the components of the supply/ demand balance during the winter of 2021/2022, with awareness-raising days both internally and with the French Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition. In addition, an analysis of the Continuity of Information Systems is carried out at the Group level and completed according to specificities in each of the business lines’ Business Continuity Plans.
In order to protect its assets and limit the impact of certain events on its financial position, the EDF group has dedicated insurance programmes that cover its major risks in terms of property damage, civil liability and insurance of persons. Nuclear risks are subject to the specific civil liability regime described below.
The Group Insurance Division is responsible, while respecting the management independence of the regulated infrastructure operators, for preparing the insurance policy of the EDF group and organising its implementation throughout the Group in order to continuously optimise the overall costs of its insurable risks (1).
The Insurance Managers of entities and controlled subsidiaries that join the Group’s programmes are responsible for:
This work, carried out in close collaboration with the Group Insurance Division, allows for continuous improvement of the quality of information on insurable risks as programmes are renewed and prevention visits are carried out (assessment of maximum possible losses, “MPL”). In connection with prevention actions, the Group Insurance Division establishes and oversees implementation of the site inspection programmes.
Purpose: the Insurance policy, approved by the Executive Committee in January 2017, specifies the risks that the Group decides to transfer to the market and the general principles for optimising these transfers: mass purchasing through the implementation of Group insurance programmes, sharing between traditional markets and other types of cover (specialised mutual insurance companies, transfer to the financial markets, etc.), individual and Group deductibles (generally, only large-scale risks are transferred) and optimisation of intermediation expenses.
(1) Risks that can be transferred to the insurance markets and the alternative markets.
