Posted 23 Feb. 2023 at 6:30 PM
Money still available long after the judicial liquidation, lack of supporting documents allowing verification on documents, unauthorized individual credit accounts, artificially inflated liabilities… Reading of the complaint filed by the Employers’ Association for Wage Guarantee (AGS) in mid-December 2019 and relaunched in mid-2020 gives substance to the suspicions of fraud that have surrounded the practices of certain legal representatives for years.
This complaint of breach of trust, forgery and use of forgery and concealment to which “Les Echos” had access emanates from the AGS and its operational arm, the DUA. For historical reasons, the DUA is an institution of Unédic, the joint unemployment insurance scheme.
Important clarification, hammer Unédic, Medef and CFDT: these complaints have no connection with the current dismissal of the national director of the DUA, Houria Aouimeur, even if it is she who is at the origin. , having received a mandate, when hired at the end of 2018, to do the cleaning.
The previous LIP
Created in 1973 in the wake of the resounding bankruptcy of the watch manufacturer LIP, the AGS is a real social shock absorber. Financed by an employer’s contribution, the association pays the salaries when there is not enough money left in the coffers. Because of its rank as privileged creditor, it recovers part of it if the recovery plan or the sale of the movables, in the event of liquidation, allows it.
If Houria Aouimeur was appointed, it is because the AGS (and therefore the Medef) had noticed for some time that money was coming back less and less. The Advolis firm, then the internal services of the DUA, then investigate to ensure the use of the funds. These audits pinpoint more than questionable practices of legal representatives, four in particular, whose mission it is to defend the interests of creditors.
Example with this Parisian Trustee whose judicial liquidation was pronounced at the end of 2007. The file was placed in losses for the AGS while the audits showed that ten years later the distribution account (which groups together the sums drawn from the assets to distributed among creditors according to their rank) was a creditor of 123,019 euros. Enough to reimburse part of the super-privileged debt of the AGS (which was 345,000 euros).
Another example is this northern manufacturer of transport equipment, which closed shop in 2010. available money to cover its costs, those of the receiver and the auctioneer. Verification made, there is “only” for 361,000 euros.
Willingness to deliberately defraud
“The withholding for several years of significant funds on the pretext of paying remuneration for lesser amounts not intended to be deducted from the sums to be returned to the AGS […] therefore appears to result from a deliberate desire to make of these funds a use contrary to that which presided over their delivery, ”we can read in the complaint. And again, in the case of this industrialist, the audit found the elements sought in the archives of the registry.
In many other cases, such as for this shipyard sunk in 2010, the court decisions fixing the emoluments are untraceable… This is also the case for this association of carers which closed shop in 2012. Six years later, a court pronounces a closure for insufficiency of assets whereas it “appears from this judgment that in reality the distribution account presented a positive balance of some 556,995.74 euros which should have made it possible to completely pay off the AGS from its super-privileged debt of nearly 300,000 euros”.
Problem: nothing has come up since 2019. Worse, consultation of the liquidation reports at the registry was not possible, the agent having not submitted them. Finally, what about this airline, grounded in the early 2000s, whose liquidation report cannot be consulted at the registry, which nevertheless declares that it has been archived.
Extract from the AGS complaint for breach of trust, forgery and use of forgery and concealment:
“The fraudulent system which appears to have been put in place to the detriment of the wage guarantee scheme appears to have been set up to either close files prematurely, or not to close them for several years, on the pretext of a fictitious lack of assets, by means of documents that do not correspond to the reality and of accounts making it possible to keep the sums remitted on a precarious basis then diverted in appearance to accounts unrelated to the procedure. »
Labels and non-value admission
Implemented by the former management of the DUA AGS, two procedures fuel suspicions of embezzlement. Primo, a non-binding label awarded to more than 150 agents, i.e. half of the profession, giving access in particular to a payment of funds on D + 1 with random control a posteriori. Secondly, the accounting practice “of admission in non-value” (ANV). In particular, it made it possible to classify as losses liquidation files that had not been closed for more than ten years, provided that the agent established a certificate of irrecoverability. Cumulatively, NVAs represented 569 million from 2014 to 2018, to the great surprise of the AGS office.