This is a translation into English of the statutory auditors’ report on the financial statements of the Company issued in French and it is provided solely for the convenience of English speaking users. This statutory auditors’ report includes information required by European regulation and French law, such as information about the appointment of the statutory auditors or verification of the management report and other documents provided to shareholders. This report should be read in conjunction with, and construed in accordance with, French law and professional auditing standards applicable in France.
To the Annual General meeting of Publicis Groupe SA,
In compliance with the engagement entrusted to us by your annual general meetings, we have audited the accompanying financial statements of Publicis Groupe SA for the year ended December 31, 2019. These financial statements were approved by the Management Board on February 3, 2020 based on the information available at that date regarding the evolving context of Covid 19’s sanitary crisis
In our opinion, the financial statements give a true and fair view of the assets and liabilities and of the financial position of the Company as at December 31, 2019 and of the results of its operations for the year then ended in accordance with French accounting principles
The audit opinion expressed above is consistent with our report to the Audit Committee.
We conducted our audit in accordance with professional standards applicable in France. We believe that the audit evidence we have obtained is sufficient and appropriate to provide a basis for our opinion.
Our responsibilities under those standards are further described in the ‘’Statutory Auditors’ Responsibilities for the Audit of the Financial Statements’’ section of our report.
We conducted our audit engagement in compliance with independence rules applicable to us, for the period from January 1,v2019 to the date of our report and specifically we did not provide any prohibited non-audit services referred to in Article 5(1) of Regulation (EU) No 537/2014 or in the French Code of Ethics (Code de déontologie) for statutory auditors.
In accordance with the requirements of Articles L.823-9 and R.823-7 of the French Commercial Code (Code de commerce) relating to the justification of our assessments, we inform you of the key audit matters relating to risks of material misstatement that, in our professional judgment, were of most significance in our audit of the financial statements of the current period, as well as how we addressed those risks
These matters were addressed in the context of our audit of the financial statements as a whole, approved in the aforementioned context, and in forming our opinion thereon, and we do not provide a separate opinion on specific items of the financial statements.
