The fast food giant will pay a fine of €508 million and settle a bill of €737 million for tax it failed to pay between 2009 and 2020.

State prosecutor Jean-François Bohnert said the settlement, the biggest in French legal history, was a “real punishment, symbolically and economically”.

The company allegedly lowered its bill in France by illegally transferring the fees it obtained from its franchises to a unit in Luxembourg.

Judge Stéphane Noël, at Paris criminal court, said that the scheme enabled McDonald’s to “absorb a great share of the profits made by its French restaurants and to reduce the taxes paid in France by the different structures of the group”.