France Télécom (Orange since 2013) and former members of its board of directors have been convicted on Friday of "moral harassment" of their former employees for company policy that caused ten years ago a wave of suicides among their workers in full phase of restructuring of the French telephone company. France Télécom thus becomes the first large French company condemned in France for moral harassment.

The Correctional Court of Paris has found members of the former leadership of the telephone company, including former CEO Didier Lombard, guilty of "moral harassment" and "complicity in moral harassment."

Lombard, who led France Télécom from 2005 to 2010, has been sentenced to one year in prison (of which he will have to serve four months) and a fine of 15,000 euros . Among those convicted are also the company's number two, Louis-Pierre Wenès, and the former director of human resources, Olivier Barberot.

All three were found guilty of moral harassment between 2007 and 2008, when the restructuring plan was launched, but they were acquitted for the period 2009-2010, which was also listed in the indictment. After the conviction is known, Lombard has announced that it will appeal the sentence .

Four other executives were convicted of "complicity in moral harassment" and sentenced to four months in prison exempt from compliance and 5,000 euros of fine.

For its part, the group, now Orange, must pay 75,000 euros , the maximum expected fine. Orange announced in a press release that it will not appeal.

France Télécom was affected by a wave of suicides between 2007 and 2010 after the implementation of an ambitious restructuring plan, after the State privatized the company.

The unions denounced during the trial that the company's executives launched "a system of widespread harassment" to force 22,000 employees to leave the company between 2006 and 2008, in a plan known as the "NExT plan." In addition 10,000 people out of the 120,000 that the group had were going to be forced to change jobs. Many of the employees were officials so they could not be fired.

During the trial it was demonstrated that there was a strategy of systematic "bullying" by the company with the objective of "destabilizing workers, creating a distressing climate and having as its objective and effect a worsening of working conditions".

The case broke out ten years ago, when a technician from Marseille, who committed suicide in July 2009, accused the company in the note he left before taking his own life from being the cause of his death and denounced a "management (company ) based on terror. "

According to the unions and the company, 35 employees took their lives between 2008 and 2009, some of them in their workplace. One of the most striking suicides was that of Rémy, a 56-year-old worker who immolated himself in April 2011 in the parking lot of one of the offices of France Télécom. Another worker, Jean-Michel, threw himself on the train tracks. Another technician, Yonelle, attempted suicide by sticking a knife in her belly in the middle of a work meeting after being announced that she would be transferred to a call center.

The moral harassment trial focused on the case of 39 employees: 19 of whom committed suicide, 12 tried and eight suffered acute depression or had to take sick leave due to the increasing pressure they suffered to leave the company.

During the trial, Lombard denied that the board of directors was responsible for these deaths, although during the restructuring phase he said that the dismissals would be made "one way or another, through the window or through the door." In 2009, the former CEO of France Télécom also said there was "a suicide fashion," in another unfortunate statement he regretted later.

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