Paris (AFP)

"Put that behind us": the insurer Axa has resigned itself to releasing an envelope of 300 million euros for 15,000 of its restaurant customers, hoping to put an end to a long list of lawsuits on the issue of losses linked to Covid- 19.

"We are today at a key moment in France, the reopening of restaurants and bars but also the reopening of the economy. We want to support our restaurant customers in this reopening, (...) it is important to put this behind us. difficulty, the legal vagueness that we experienced in the case of restaurateurs, "said Thursday on Europe 1 Thomas Buberl, the CEO of the Axa group.

A standoff has been pitting the insurer against hundreds of its restaurant customers for many months, forced to close for months due to the Covid-19 epidemic.

They accuse him of having refused to compensate their operating losses linked to the health crisis and sued him.

For its part, Axa felt that its contracts did not cover losses linked to a pandemic episode.

The group has identified no less than 1,500 legal proceedings initiated in France.

The decisions - including on appeal - have turned out to be heterogeneous.

But it is clear that the insurer has often lost.

Axa suffered in May before a court in Aix-en-Provence his first defeat on appeal against a Marseille restaurateur.

The Bordeaux Court of Appeal, on the other hand, dismissed a local restaurant on Monday.

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And the situation did not seem ready to improve for the insurer: the Syndicat des Indépendants (SDI) had announced in May to sue him on behalf of ten of its members before several courts.

- Recovery rather than litigation -

"I regret everything that happened, because we were divided with the restaurateurs by a misunderstanding. We have seen that the courts of appeal have ruled in several directions. We want to put this behind us," said M Buberl.

The insurer has decided to release an envelope of "300 million for the 15,000 restaurateurs who are Axa customers so that we can support the relaunch", he said, insisting that "this solution is not not compensation, it is a transaction ".

This means that if customers accept it, they will at the same time have to waive any legal action against the insurer in this case.

"We offer a transaction to many people who have not asked for anything, even people who have lost (in court) now have the right to this transaction," said Mr. Buberl.

"Axa has 100 million customers, for 15,000 we put 300 million on the table, it is really a large sum", he insisted, specifying that the group's agents will now work in the field to assess the needs. of each customer.

"We want to launch this operation as quickly as possible, from June, we will have a firing window until the end of September," Patrick Cohen, CEO of Axa France, explained to AFP. that the group now wants to "mobilize energy on recovery rather than on litigation".

© 2021 AFP