On the one hand, the public prosecutor who claims that a message be “addressed to all defaulting owners” in the face of the “chronicle of an announced death”. On the other, defense lawyers who consider “not to have heard any criminal demonstration” and plead that “it is not the rue d’Aubagne”, calling on the criminal court of Marseille not to do “act of ‘example “. The shadow of the collapsed buildings of Noailles and their victims hovered this Friday during a trial on a degraded condominium, emblematic in many respects.
The former LR vice-president of the metropolis Bernard Jacquier, and owner of one of the apartments until February 2019, is indeed one of the twelve defendants. He is also a “knower”, as the president of the court recalls, who is surprised that the lawyer specializing in real estate law, still active at the time of the events, did not find a legal way to remedy the the trustee’s inaction.
In fact, several successive decrees hit this condominium located in the Belle-de-Mai district, near the Saint-Charles station. The first, dated April 4, 2017, found unsanitary conditions, then reversible, and prescribed work. But no major work capable of reversing the situation has been carried out, even after a formal notice from the prefecture in August 2018. On February 22, 2019, the city of Marseille issued a decree of imminent danger this time. The building is evacuated.
“I didn’t sell, I got rid of it”
“I had proposed a judicial administrator, but that was not possible because of the accounts receivable from the co-ownership, defends Bernard Jacquier at the bar. I did not feel able to initiate proceedings to force the trustee to initiate proceedings against those who do not pay their charges. Instead, he decides to sell his property. A compromise was signed in October 2018, at a price of 4,000 euros, with another owner who already has two apartments in the building, where his mother also lives.
“In fact, I didn’t sell, I got rid of it, as I didn’t know the exit from the tunnel,” says Bernard Jacquier. His lawyer, Me Béatrice Dupuy, argues that the charges against his client only run over a period of two months, between the formal notice of 2018 and the signing of the sales agreement, in which he disengages from all decisions taken afterwards. Like her colleagues, she also refutes the intentional element and the proper notification of the decree by the syndic.
“Not sleep merchants”
In this trial, one of the main defendants, who has since died, is missing. His personality indeed enamels the file, and his triple hat, as he combined the functions of syndic, owner of one of the buildings of the building and property manager (Bernard Jacquier had notably entrusted him with the management of his) . “There are people who did not pay their charges because of disputes with him, he had a single water meter for the entire condominium”, says one of the defendants who inherited the apartment in joint possession from his mother. “We were doing general meetings, but six months later, we saw each other again, nothing had changed”, confides a defendant who had bought his apartment for 44,000 euros, and sold it in 2021 for 10,800 euros. “I said that I agreed to the work, I asked for proof of charges from the trustee who did not provide them,” said another owner.
“It is obvious that these profiles are not sleep merchants,” says prosecutor Guillaume Bricier. However, he requires a three-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 5,000 euros against each civil personality, without making a distinction between them or noting Bernard Jacquier’s elected status. “The first duty of an owner is to take care of his property,” he believes. These lawsuits are also there to show that we cannot do nothing. We are not in a syndic AG here, we are here to respond to criminal offenses. »
“Today we are on a sinking building, and we unfortunately know what this can lead to in this city, to collapse”, also recalls Guillaume Bricier. The city of Marseilles, for its part, is a civil party. The deliberation will be delivered on June 2. The fate of the building is already sealed: it is destined for destruction.