The Marseille court sentenced the Spanish company to 80 million euros in damages to URSSAF on Friday to compensate for the damage linked to the non-payment of social contributions.
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The Marseille court has just inflicted a very heavy financial sanction on a Spanish temporary company involved in a hidden work case. TERRAGE FECUNDI – Recently renamed Work For All – was sentenced on Friday June 10, to pay just over 80 million euros in damages to URSSAF to compensate for the damage linked to the non -payment of social security contributions . This is a “record”, according to M e Jean-Victor Borel, the lawyer for this organization. The decision, which takes place in the plan of civilian interests, is an extension of the judgment rendered on July 9, 2021 on the criminal ground in the same file: the ex-terra fecrandis had then been inflicted 500,000 euros in fine – either the maximum incurred – and suspended prison sentences had been pronounced against several of its leaders – or ex -leaders.
The incriminated facts date back to the period from 2012 to 2015. The Spanish company was continued for having made available to market gardeners established in the South, several thousand employees without declaring them to French social organizations. In addition, the workers concerned, mostly of Ecuadorian nationality, underwent serious damage to their rights: overtime unpaid, maximum durations of employment very widely exceeded … It was “germinal on farms”, according to the formula launched during the trial by the public prosecutor, Xavier Leonetti.
The offenses were committed by unscrewing the so -called “detachment” system. This system allows a boss to send staff abroad, while adjusting social contributions to the state where it is established. On one condition: “exported” employees must only carry out temporary missions in the host country. An obligation from which the ex-Terra Fecundis exempted itself, by working its temporary workers for months in France, without affiliating them to the URSSAF, while paying its contributions in Spain, where they are lower.
Friday judgment is both a “very good victory” and a “outcome” as part of “the biggest affair of social fraud ever judged in France”, confides M Borel. “The court has granted all of our requests,” he adds, the damages allocated corresponding to the contributions that the ex-terra fecrandis should have paid to the URSSAF. “It is a great satisfaction”, adds to M e Vincent Schneegans, the council of two organizations of the CFDT which were civil parties in the procedure and which obtained 15,000 euros each, “in repair of the moral prejudice “. The Paysanne Confederation, also a civil party, for its part, has given itself 10,000 euros in the same way. The Spanish company will appeal the decision – as for the judgment of July 2021.