de Maison Rouge, Olivier

Economic Intelligence Obligations: From Mandatory Disclosure to Transparency - 2016.


3

Intelligence gathering is generally seen as the practice of actively collecting qualified information. However, intelligence is sometimes obtained passively, from the recipient’s point of view, in the sense that legitimate holders of information may come under an obligation to disclose it, in other words to hand over relevant knowledge they may have. The right to hold knowledge is then paralleled by an obligation to disclose it, which can be highly intrusive for information holders who are forced to hand it over against their will whenever required to do so by law: to tax authorities, auditors, legal authorities, competition and market authorities, etc. The recipient, in return has an obligation to keep the information confidential. This guarantee is in a sense the result of confidentiality in the disclosure of secrets.