The white vans of Scopelec technicians are part of the landscape of our countryside. They are often the ones who disembark with their nacelles when the Internet is down and an old wooden telephone pole has given way under the onslaught of the Autan or Mistral winds. But until when ? Tuesday evening, the Lyon commercial court placed the largest cooperative in France – and its 2,600 remaining employees, against 3,600 a year ago – in receivership.
For this large Orange subcontractor, created in 1973 in Revel, in the Haute-Garonne, one of the main sites of which is today in Saint-Orens, in the suburbs of Toulouse, the nightmare, “the tsunami”, began in November 2021. When the operator, who called on Scopelec for the laying of the fiber and the maintenance of the network, withdrew one of its usual markets, particularly in Occitania, on the grounds that the service was not optimum. Orange preferred a Luxembourg company, suddenly depriving its historical subcontractor of 40% of its turnover from March 2022.
Everything then came together for the cooperative. In June 2022, a social plan in June recorded the elimination of 550 jobs, not counting voluntary departures, over time.
political impotence
However, Scopelec and its employees, today “disgusted and annoyed”, do not lack political support. In the wake of the president of Occitanie, the socialist Carole Delga, all the major local elected officials have pleaded the cause of the cooperative with the State, a 23% shareholder in Orange. On September 19, it was François Ruffin who came with the LFI deputies from Haute-Garonne in support to Saint-Orens. Saint-Orens whose ex-mayor is none other Dominique Faure (Renaissance), the new Secretary of State for Rurality. According to our information, employees even spoke to Bruno Le Maire. And the Macronist deputies, like Monique Iborra, do not save themselves.
Despite all this pressure, negotiations with Orange were unsuccessful. The Lyon commercial court could not rely in particular on the 20 million euros in debt waiver from Orange, a time mentioned in the negotiations. “They dropped us,” plague a union source.
Orange assumes
But Orange assumes. “We did commit months ago to a debt waiver to support any plan by Scopelec that would be viable and sustainable, and today, unfortunately, we have been forced to see that no such plan was not presented, explains to 20 minutes Marc Blanchet, the operator’s technical and information system director. Our responsibility vis-à-vis our customers, and our economic responsibility, he adds, is not to put 20 million euros and find ourselves in the wall in three months, or in six months. »
The operator also wishes to point out that the market is shrinking now that 80% of France is equipped with fiber and that Scopelec still has contracts with it, for 90 million euros per year on average, “and for the six years who come “.
If Scopelec survives the “tsunami”. In a press release, the cooperative indicates this Wednesday that “companies applying for the partial or total takeover of activities have until November 2 to appear before the court”. There is one month left to save at least a part of an economic adventure and an original model. Scopelec employees hold 75% of its capital and have a proportional weight in the decisions.