Scopelec, the main French cooperative group and subcontractor to operator Orange for fiber optic networks, has been placed in receivership by the Lyon commercial court, the company said in a press release on Wednesday. “Companies that request the partial or total acquisition of activities have until November 2 to appear before the court,” it is specified. For the management of Scopelec, “this procedure occurs after the decision not to renew the contracts within the framework of a tender launched by Orange in 2021.”
The company provided fiber optic installation and maintenance of the copper network for the former established telecommunications operator. Its survival is at stake since Orange’s announcement of the loss of most of this market in November 2021, which contributed 40% of its turnover. According to Scopelec, Orange is responsible for the failure of the safeguard procedure by refusing “to support the company up to the 20 million euros still promised”.
Asked by AFP, Orange replied that this “debt forgiveness” was conditional on the presentation of a “viable and lasting backup plan”, while Scopelec is not yet, according to them, capable of ensuring the activity under the new contract initiated in April. . “When you brutally tell a company that it is going to lose three quarters of its turnover, you can imagine that it is a tsunami for the teams,” Scopelec management reacted to AFP.
1000 voluntary departures
There have already been more than 1,000 voluntary departures since the start of the crisis at the end of 2021 for this group of 3,600 employees. After months of negotiation under the Interministerial Committee for Industrial Restructuring (Ciri), Scopelec had rejected an Orange proposal that he considered insufficient. “If the offer had not been rejected, we would not be here,” says Ralph Bindauer, lawyer for the economic and social committee of Setelen, the first subsidiary of Scopelec also put into recovery.
Today, “either the new management of Scopelec is capable of presenting a recovery plan that is viable, but Orange would have to get its hands on it”, or the company will be absorbed by the floor with the key “social carnage” and ” the end of the cooperative model”, he explains. Scopelec is, as its name indicates, a cooperative and participatory company (Scop), which means that its employees hold the capital (in this case 74.8%) and the decision-making power It was created in 1973, the heyday of worker cooperatives, in Revel (Haute-Garonne).
Source: BFM TV
