France Telecom trial: “institutional moral harassment” confirmed by Court of Appeal

Didier Lombard, ex-CEO of France Telecom, and Louis-Pierre Wenès, ex-number 2 of the company, were sentenced to a year of suspended imprisonment, a sentence lower than requisitions and that of first Instance.

Le Monde

The words are more sober, the penalties and the damages granted are slightly revised downwards, but the bottom is the same. By retaining the guilt of the former CEO of France Telecom, Didier Lombard, and that of his ex-numero 2, Louis-Pierre Wenès, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed the concept of “institutional moral harassment” that the court Correctional had brought into the case law, by its judgment of December 20, 2019. The two former leaders were sentenced to one year of imprisonment entirely accompanied by the stay – the maximum incurred was a firm year – and 15,000 euros of fine, a sentence lower than the requisitions and that of first instance, which included four months firm.

The court also declared guilty of this harassment of two former executives, Brigitte Dumont and Nathalie Boulanger, respectively sentenced to six and four months suspended, and released two other defendants, Patrick Moulin and Guy-Patrick Cherrouvrier. The France Telecom company, which has become Orange, had not appealed its conviction at the maximum instance of the fine of fine incurred, 75,000 euros fine.

“runoff”

Such was the major issue of the appeal trial of “the France Telecom affair”, whose modernization in the Mitan of the 2000s, in a context of radical transformation of the telephony market, had resulted in a deep social crisis and A wave of suicides among his agents. “Organizational decisions taken within the professional framework can, in a particular context, be a source of permanent insecurity for all the staff and become harassment for certain employees (…) Institutional harassment has the specificity of being in cascade, with A runoff effect, regardless of the absence of a hierarchical link between [the defendants] and [the victims] “, notes the court.

She takes up her account the reasoning which had convinced the investigating judges, then the judges of first instance: if the drop in the workforce was not at the start a priority, it became, from 2006 , “under pressure from the financial objectives set by the group’s management. The fear of not achieving these objectives could decide the managers to establish the industrial harassment policy”.

For lack of being able to obtain, on the basis of volunteering, the 22,000 departures desired, the strategy consisted in making employees leave “by the window or by the door”, in the words pronounced by Didier Lombard himself during of a seminar of motivation for executives in October 2006. A seminar who, for judges, signs “a turning point in the violence of words and in the systematization of the Directorist and Authoritarian method”.

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/Media reports.