2023-12-17 18:13:31
Under a winter sun, more than 2,000 people (counted in the morning by the prefecture) demonstrated on Sunday December 17 in Saint-Étienne at the call of the inter-union (FO, CGT, CFDT, Unsa, CFE-CGC) of the Casino group. Employees, subcontractors, elected officials or customers… They braved the freezing cold to defend jobs, stores (Casino, Franprix, Monoprix, Cdiscount, Spar, etc.) and demonstrate their attachment to the brand on the verge of bankruptcy.
Created one hundred and twenty-five years ago in Saint-Étienne by Geoffroy Guichard, the Casino group is the largest private employer in the department, with 1,800 employees at headquarters, and double that with warehouses and stores. If the Casino name disappears, it will be ” a trauma ! “, testified Quentin Bataillon, deputy for Loire Renaissance, to Agence France-Presse. “In my constituency, there is not a single family where no one has worked at Casino,” he notes, fearing a shock comparable to “the one who followed the end of the mines”.
Sale by cut
Casino still employed 200,000 people worldwide, including 50,000 in France at the end of 2022. Indebted to the tune of 6.4 billion euros, the group led since 2005 by Jean-Charles Naouri was placed in an accelerated safeguard procedure at the end of October. In July, the keys to the group had to be entrusted, from 2024, to the consortium of entrepreneurs led by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, the Frenchman Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière and the British fund Attestor.
The buyers had promised to restructure the debt and keep jobs. But, on December 7, the consortium and management informed the elected staff members that they wanted to sell what did not constitute the historic scope of Casino. The list of stores taken over or sold should be announced on Tuesday at a new meeting.
The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire declared on Wednesday that he would “attentive” that has “as many jobs as possible are preserved” in trade-in offers. He also committed to maintaining the headquarters in Saint-Étienne.
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