Question 10388 — industry

Summary

Ms. Pascale Martin alerts the Minister Delegate to the Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, responsible for industry, on the situation of Papeteries de Condat in Dordogne. Tuesday July 11, 2023, the European group Lecta, owner of the site, presented its job protection plan. It provides for the shutdown of line 4 (one of the last two production lines on the site) and the elimination of 187 positions, or almost half of the employees. These job cuts, if they materialize, will have a catastrophic effect on the economic fabric of the Dordogne. Les Papeteries de Condat is currently the largest industrial employer in this rural department. In addition to the 187 families directly impacted by the PSE, it is estimated that there are up to 2,000 jobs in Dordogne dependent on the proper functioning of the paper mills. Of the Companies, whose main customer is stationery, risk finding themselves in great difficulty. Not to mention that many local players fear that paper mills will not be viable with a single production line and that the remaining jobs will also be threatened in the near future. The company's management itself admitted, a few months ago, that the site could not be profitable with only line 8 ! At a time when the Government claims to be acting to reindustrialize the country, it would be shameful if it did not do everything in its power to avoid these massive job cuts. Especially since Condat is the last French manufacturer of double-sided coated paper and its paper is used by several major French publishing houses! Many local actors (employees, unions, elected officials) share the same conviction: that the company's management, under the pretext of a decline in the market, in reality made the deliberate choice to relocate the production of coated paper to its other factories located in Italy and Spain. How else can we explain that the group is announcing a drop in orders for coated paper at Condat when sales of this paper are doing much better at its other European sites? How to explain that the other factories of the group have benefited from a diversification of their production, while Condat seems to have been abandoned to an increasingly restricted number of production lines over the course of social plans? Such a relocation, if it were to occur, would be all the more scandalous as the State and the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region have allocated recent aid of 33 million euros to the company, in order to finance a boiler CSR. The amount allocated by the region (19 million euros) is particularly impressive: with such a sum, the region usually helps several dozen, even hundreds, of different companies! Lecta will have to repay this sum, but this is not the case for the aid of 14 million euros it received from the State. Will the taxes of fellow citizens have been used to finance the development of businesses located in Italy and Spain? Concerning public aid to businesses, we must stop giving public money without any justification and without precise evaluation. It's a question of social justice! It is necessary to condition aid measures for companies in difficulty on the fact that they do not pay dividends to their shareholders, with clauses to maintain activity and employment. The MP therefore asks Mr. Minister what he is going to do in order to explore all possible alternatives to the closure of line 4 and all the means to save these 187 jobs. She also asks him what he plans to do to ensure that management's desire to close line 4 is not part of a project to relocate production to other factories in the group.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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