Retention is a design decision, not an archive setting

Fiduciaries, trustees and company administrators keep records for a living. The default in most offices is to keep them all: every passport copy, every structure chart, every email thread since the firm opened. Storage is cheap, and deletion feels like risk. Yet each extra year of files is more data to secure, more to search when a regulator asks, and more to produce when a client exercises their rights. Monaco law does not ask firms to keep everything. It asks them to keep the right things for the right time, and to show how they decided.

This note reads the texts in force on 7 April 2026.

Several clocks, running at once

A Monaco fiduciary within the anti-money-laundering law typically answers to at least three sources of retention rules.

Anti-money-laundering records. Article 23 of Law No. 1.362, in the version in force since 2 March 2024, requires the bodies and persons within the law’s scope to keep for five years:

• after the end of the relationship, the documents and information obtained through customer due diligence, including identity verification, and the results of any analysis;
• from the execution of each operation, the records needed to reconstruct it precisely;
• copies of documents received from people with whom no business relationship could be established.

The period can be extended by up to five further years: on the firm’s own initiative, where needed to prevent or detect money laundering or the financing of terrorism or of weapons proliferation, and after a case-by-case assessment of proportionality; at the request of the AMSF; or at the request of the Prosecutor General, an investigating judge, or judicial police acting on their requisition, in an ongoing investigation.

Commercial books. Article 13 of the Commercial Code requires merchants to keep for ten years the books that articles 10 and 11 make them keep, such as the daily journal and the annual inventory. The rule is narrow. It binds merchants, and it covers those books, not every document a firm produces. Whether a given fiduciary structure is a merchant is a question for counsel.

Data protection. Law No. 1.565 sets the ceiling. Article 4 requires personal data to be kept in identifiable form no longer than necessary for the purposes of processing. The first two sources say how long a firm must keep certain records, where they apply to it. The third says it may not keep personal data longer than its purpose justifies.

What starts each clock

The hardest part of retention is not the period. It is the start date. The due diligence clock runs from the end of the relationship. The transaction clock runs from each operation. Most document systems record only when a file was created or last modified, which answers neither question.

A workable design makes the trigger a data field set by a business event. Closing a client relationship in the CRM stamps the relationship-end date on every due diligence record linked to that client. Each transaction record carries its execution date. A dispute or investigation sets a hold that suspends the clock. Without these fields, a five-year rule becomes a guess, and guesses drift towards keeping everything.

The record and the answer must match

Law No. 1.565 makes retention visible. Article 27 requires the record of processing to state, where possible, the retention period or the criteria used to set it. Article 12 gives each person the right to learn, within one month, the envisaged retention period or those criteria. Article 23 requires that, by default, the processing of personal data be limited to what each purpose needs, including in how long it is kept.

A firm that writes “five years” in its record but keeps files indefinitely has two problems: a policy that is not applied, and an answer to a client that is not true.

Deletion is harder than retention

Deleting a record from the document system rarely deletes the data. Copies sit in email archives, shared drives, exports sent through a client portal, search indexes and, more and more, the embeddings of a private AI assistant. An end-of-life action has to reach each of them, or the firm has deleted only the copy it could see.

Processors are part of the same chain. Article 26 requires processor contracts to provide that, at the end of the service, the processor deletes or returns the data, at the controller’s choice, and destroys existing copies unless the law applicable to it requires them to be kept.

Backups need their own rule. CISA’s ransomware guide, updated in September 2023, advises keeping offline, encrypted backups and testing them, because attackers try to delete reachable ones. Those same backups hold data the firm has deleted from live systems. The practical answer is to set backup retention to a known, documented period, and to record that any restore must re-apply the deletions made since the backup was taken.

When hardware leaves service, NIST’s Guidelines for Media Sanitization, revised in September 2025, describe sanitization as making access to the target data infeasible for a given level of effort, with methods chosen by the sensitivity of the information. A disk from a fiduciary’s file server deserves the stronger end of that range.

One client, several purposes

The same document can sit under different clocks. A trustee receives a settlor’s passport. The copy in the due diligence file follows article 23 of Law No. 1.362. The same scan, attached to an email and saved to a general correspondence folder, has no clock at all. It will outlive the relationship by decades unless the system knows what it is.

Two habits prevent this. Documents are filed by purpose at intake, not by sender. And the general folders that collect everything else carry a default review period, so that nothing sits outside the schedule.

A schedule that people can apply

A retention schedule becomes usable when each line answers seven questions:

• Category: what kind of record, such as due diligence file or transaction record.
• Purpose: why the firm holds it.
• Legal source: the article that sets a minimum, if any.
• Trigger: the event that starts the clock.
• Period: how long after the trigger.
• End action: delete, anonymise or review, and in which systems.
• Owner: the person who approves extensions and holds.

Extensions and holds need a record of their own: who decided, why, and when the hold ends. Article 23 of Law No. 1.362 asks for a proportionality assessment before an extension on the firm’s initiative. That assessment belongs in writing.

Limits of this note

This is not legal advice. It reflects texts in force on 7 April 2026, including article 23 of Law No. 1.362 in its version of 2 March 2024. Sector rules, limitation periods for claims and trust instruments can set other periods, and they are outside this note. Firms should confirm their schedule with Monegasque counsel. To discuss how a schedule becomes a system, write to contact@desgarde.com.