Bordeaux (AFP)
The Soyaux-Angoulême rugby club (Pro D2) and three leaders were sentenced Monday in Bordeaux to fines, quite widely accompanied by reprieve, for "hidden work", especially because they passed players for self-employed photographers from 2014 to 2016, when the Charentais club was still an amateur.
The association was fined 100,000 euros by the criminal court (including 70,000 suspended sentences) while Jean Alémany and Jean-Jacques Pitcho, as co-presidents at the material time, and Didier Pitcho, current president but then de facto leader, respectively received 20,000 (including 15,000 suspended sentence), 30,000 (including 15,000 suspended) and 40,000 (including 10,000 suspended) euros fine, without registration of the sentence in their criminal record.
Sentences which correspond more or less to the requisitions.
They will also have to pay 20,000 euros to the Urssaf Poitou-Charentes, civil party, for non-pecuniary damage, when the latter claimed 55,000 euros, and 15,000 euros for legal costs.
Regarding the financial loss suffered by the body collecting social contributions, which assessed the club's tax arrears at 2.2 million euros, the judges referred the case to the Angoulême court.
The court, which found that part of the facts (before February 2014) were prescribed, especially pinned the club (amateur until its accession to Pro D2 in 2016) for the remuneration of players as "photographers" autoentrepreneurs even though they have never exercised this activity.
These payments, which made it possible not to go beyond the wage bill limits according to the court, exceeded 500,000 euros for the period from 2014 to mid 2016.
Regarding the payment of mileage allowances despite the provision of company vehicles, the hidden remuneration was only retained for the case of two players, out of the 70 or so people potentially affected between 2013 and 2015.
"There is sanctioned a somewhat amateur management of a then amateur club, which also seems to be a fairly generalized model", reacted the lawyer of the club and the defendants, Me Lionel Béthune de Moro, who sees a " partial conviction ".
"It sticks quite well to what the representative of the prosecution said at the hearing: + We are not facing thugs +", he added.
According to Me Lionel Béthune de Moro, who does not rule out appealing, "this system, if we can speak of a system, was not invented by SA XV and is used by a certain number of amateur activities. which use optimizations. The club had also been advised by a lawyer specializing in sports law, and this system has already been recognized as being lawful by other jurisdictions for other clubs. "
The club, born in 2010 from the merger of those of Angoulême and Soyaux and currently the last of ProD2, found itself in the legal melee after an inspection of Urssaf in 2016, as part of increased checks on clubs sportsmen.
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