Lille (AFP)

The worries of the former employees of Whirlpool were founded: just one year after the resumption of the site by the local industrialist Nicolas Decayeux, the company, without sufficient commercial outlets, was placed Tuesday in receivership.

The new owner of the site, WN, "is in a very important cash gap that will lead him to put himself under the protection of the commercial court (...) to ensure the assumption of salaries", said the prefecture of the Somme in a statement late afternoon.

"This critical situation is due to WN's difficulties in making its innovative industrial projects concrete commercial opportunities in the short or medium term.The low turnover currently generated does not allow the company to finance its activity despite the importance of financial efforts "by the State (2.5 M EUR) and Whirlpool (7.4 M EUR), details the prefecture.

A spokeswoman for WN confirmed to AFP that the company was placed on Tuesday in receivership, but that there were no plans to transfer.

The day after the closure of the plant, relocated to Lodz (Poland) by the American giant of the electrical appliances, the site was taken over by the industrialist Picard Nicolas Decayeux, president of the Medef of the Somme. Renamed WN, the company had to start producing connected refrigerated lockers, making battery chargers for bicycles and cars, and creating a collaborative factory.

Ambitious projects that have hardly come into existence. "It's terrible for the employees (...) but we expected it, it's been a year that this company exists and there is nothing that comes out.What Decayeux touched by Whirlpool paid salaries" reacted to AFP Frédéric Chanterelle, CFDT delegate at Whirlpool.

- "We were fooled" -

In a statement, Nicolas Decayeux says, however, still believe in a better future: "after a start of the late business, the company is currently negotiating with several serious partners to develop its main business of Shopping Box (...) do not give up and we continue to believe in the success of our innovative project. "

Asked in mid-May by AFP, Mr. Decayeux had already been relatively optimistic: "We are at the beginning of the launch of new business, it takes a little time".

"We were fooled," also told AFP Pascal Lefebvre, CFTC deputy secretary of the CE. "We had sounded the alarm for several months! (...) WN has no contracts It's been a year that three quarters of people do not work, there are roughly forty people working. when there is nothing coming in, we can not pay, we said it over and over again to anyone who wants to hear it but no one has moved, "he said on Tuesday.

"A year ago, the colleagues were fired and one year later they are on the brink again, two shots like that, you really need to get your spirits up, now you do not know what they're going to become ", he was still alarmed.

On May 31, 2018, WN had taken over 162 of the 282 employees in the dryer factory. In January 2017, at the announcement of the closure of its site, Whirlpool still employed 300 people on permanent contracts, 250 full-time temporary workers and a hundred people at the sub-contractor for plastics Prima-France.

The struggle of the employees of the factory, become the symbol of industrial relocations, was invited in the 2017 presidential campaign with a pass of weapons on site between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen during the between-two-laps.

Henceforth, "the priority is to reclassify" the employees of WN, affirms still the prefecture, which specifies that "meetings will be organized in the coming days in order to identify the companies which could have an interest for a resumption of the activity or the employees".

? 2019 AFP