INTERVIEW
Invoices are piling up and for smaller businesses this becomes difficult easy to manage. So how can we prevent late payments from turning into a legal battle? The conciliation platform "special Covid" was launched Tuesday morning in order to help entrepreneurs to settle disputes related to the coronavirus crisis. A project led by the Paris Place de Droit association, on the initiative of the Cercle Montesquieu, the Paris bar, the AFJE (French association of corporate lawyers) and the Paris commercial court. Paul-Louis Netter, president of the Paris Commercial Court, explains to Europe 1 Tuesday what this temporary body, open for a few weeks, consists of.
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"The audience may be extremely large: it is you, business manager, trader, craftsman ...", he explains. "You had to pay for a delivery, such or such service, and because of the Covid, you found yourself dried up in terms of liquidity", this platform is made for you, says Paul-Louis Netter. "There is not a person of good faith and a person of bad faith. These problems do not necessarily deserve contentious treatment," said the president of the commercial court.
Third-party conciliators will intervene free of charge
The platform thus offers the possibility of a non-judicial resolution of disputes, to companies that have experienced contractual breaches on the part of their business partners affected by the containment. This upstream recourse thus proposed to companies only concerns contractual difficulties caused by the health crisis.
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To take advantage of it, simply register on the platform. Then "a conciliator" will be appointed. "He will put the oil in the cogs to try to reach a negotiated solution which has the agreement of the two rather than arriving at a solution which will be determined by a judge", explains Paul-Louis Netter. "So we are deliberately outside the procedural rules," he notes. But the entrepreneurs are helped by third conciliators "accustomed to these rules" and who will intervene free of charge "to facilitate the resumption of economic life".