(20 Dec 2019) French phone and internet provider Orange was found guilty Friday over a string of employee suicides and its former CEO was sentenced to prison, in a landmark ruling against a major European telecommunications player.
Orange was fined 75,000 euros (more than $83,000) and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of euros in damages over suicides between 2006 and 2009 while the company was undergoing difficult restructuring.
Orange - which was called France Telecom at the time - is France's first big company to be tried on a charge of institutionalized "collective moral harassment," and the ruling could open up the possibility for other companies to face similar legal challenges.
France is one of only a handful of countries in the world with laws allowing for the prosecution of companies or individuals in such cases.
The company's ex-CEO Didier Lombard was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison and ordered to pay 15,000 euros in fines, and his lawyer announced plans to appeal. Other managers were also sentenced to short prison terms and thousands of euros in fines.
They denied responsibility for suicides of people they didn't know.
But the court ruled they and the company were guilty of collective moral harassment, saying in its ruling: "It was their actions that created an anxiety-producing climate."
It said the methods used to cut 22,000 jobs were illegal.  
Outside the court, a union leader said the verdict was too lenient, and described seeing one of his colleages at Orange kill herself by jumping out of a window.
Orange is still France's dominant telephone company and has operations in 26 countries around Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Its share price did not see significant change after the ruling.
Lombard, his former right-hand man Louis-Pierre Wenes and the director of human resources Olivier Barberot were convicted for leading a "policy of destabilization" as they sought to shed thousands of jobs. Four other managers were convicted of complicity.
Scores of employees killed themselves amid the restructuring. The trial focused on 39 cases between 2006 and 2009: 19 suicides, 12 suicide attempts and eight cases of serious depression. Other employee suicides couldn't be linked directly and solely with their work.

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