Several companies from Central Europe have been banned by the French justice system from engaging in cabotage on French territory until December 1, 2026. These decisions were taken after repeated violations were found during inspections.
A useful reminder: for several years now, every road transport company working on behalf of third parties has been traceable through a public register, the ERRU. The inspection services use these registers to record violations by transport companies (this information is not accessible to the general public).
The French press reports that three companies guilty of repeated violations have been banned from cabotage for a year by Sophie Brocas, the prefect of the Centre-Val de Loire region. Each of these companies has committed more than 10 violations in the field of cabotage and/or compliance with driving and rest times. The magazine Les Routiers, together with the daily newspapers Le Monde and Le Progrès, created a pool of journalists and discovered the names of the three companies involved. This primarily concerns the Romanian company KPO Trade Invest SARL, which officially owns only 13 vehicles in Romania, but carries out transports in France through a local subsidiary with, according to our colleagues, 40 vehicles.
The second company that has come into focus is Torello TN SK, a Slovak subsidiary of the large Italian group Torello. In March 2025, Les Routiers magazine revealed that 30 French drivers had been replaced by 15 Romanians and 15 Serbs to drive for Action through Torello’s French subsidiary. These drivers spent their weekends in appalling conditions, which is completely against European rules. The third name is well known on Belgian roads: it is the Lithuanian company Hoptrans, which has more than 1000 vehicles and subsidiaries in Poland and Germany. This company is also suspected of ties with Russia, which has led, among other things, to the termination of all contracts with NATO, as reported by the Polish media trans.info.
