La cour de cassassion a rejeté les pourvois de deux anciens-dirigeants de France Télécom ce 21 janvier 2025. Par cette décision, elle inscrit le "harcèlement moral institutionnelle" dans la jurisprudence.
This is the judicial epilogue of a case that is emblematic of suffering at work. On Tuesday, the Court of Cassation rejected the appeals of two former executives in the France Télécom suicide case, and enshrined institutional moral harassment in law.
Final conviction
The decision of the Court of Cassation makes the convictions of the former head of France Télécom Didier Lombard, 82, and his former number 2 Louis-Pierre Wenès, 75, final.
They had been sentenced for institutional moral harassment on September 30, 2022 by the Paris Court of Appeal to one year of suspended prison sentence and a fine of 15,000 euros, sentences reduced compared to those handed down at first instance in 2019.
The two former executives of France Télécom (which became Orange in 2013) faced justice due to the implementation from 2006 of two restructuring plans following the privatization of the company in 2004, and providing for the departure of 22,000 employees and the mobility of 10,000 others (out of some 120,000 employees).
The executives considered that they could not be convicted on the basis of the law defining moral harassment at work for what they considered to be a simple “company policy”.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000“Regardless of any consideration of the strategic choices” of a company which are its own, “the actions”aiming to implement, “with full knowledge of the facts, a company policy which aims to degrade the working conditions of all or part of the employees in order to achieve a reduction in staff numbers or to achieve any other objective, whether managerial, economic or financial, or which has the effect of such a degradation”, can characterize a situation of institutional moral harassment, writes the Court of Cassation in its judgment.
“To the bitter end”
“Until the end they did everything they could to explain that it was only a company policy” while “it was harassment wanted as such, organized as such”, reacted Me Claire Waquet, lawyer of CFE-CGC Orange, civil party.
“The former leaders are now definitively guilty of moral harassment,” the union rejoiced in a press release. “Our first thoughts go to the families of the victims of social violence by irresponsible leaders.”
“This is a major ruling,” thati “enshrines institutional harassment among the forms of harassment at work” and “brings it fully into current law,” Antoine Lyon-Caen, lawyer for the SUD-PTT union, rejoiced to AFP.
“This establishes a case law in 2025 for events that occurred 17 years earlier, but it still raises questions in light of of the principle of non-retroactivity”, commented Didier Lombard's lawyer, Louis Boré – an argument dismissed by the Court in its judgment.
At first instance, the former CEO and his former number 2 were sentenced to one year in prison, four months of which were firm, for their “preeminent role” in implementing a “hardline” workforce reduction policy over the period 2007-2008 at France Télécom.
Mr. Lombard, who repeated at the appeal trial that he had not been aware of the extent of the social climate in his company, had told his executives in 2006 that departures should be made “through the window or the door” . He had also sparked controversy by speaking of a “suicide mode”, in 2009, at the height of the crisis.
These departures at “forced march” according to the courts had led to a “deterioration of working conditions” of “thousands of employees”, some of whom committed suicide.
The crisis broke out into the open after the suicide in July 2009 of Michel Deparis, a Marseille technician who had directly implicated France Télécom in a letter.
France Telecom has become the symbol of suffering at work. The company, which had not appealed, was fined the maximum amount of 75,000 euros in a historic judgment, becoming the first CAC 40 company to be convicted of institutional moral harassment.