Camaïeu case: the battle of evidence before the Sète industrial tribunal

La boutique sétoise de la rue Gambetta a fermé en 2022 comme les 500 autres magasins en France. Archive Maxime Moerland

Plus de 200 ex-salariés poursuivent l’ancien actionnaire en justice. Dont six à Sète.

Two years after the definitive closure of all Camaïeu stores in France, the French ready-to-wear brand has just been reborn under the name Be Camaïeu, relaunched by the Celio group. But the former Camaïeu employees dismissed by the group that belonged to the sulphurous businessman Michel Ohayon are still only at the beginning of their legal battle.
The case is sprawling. Among the 2,000 employees of the French textile brand, 250 of them at the national level have decided to counter-attack. Six worked on the sites of Sète and Balaruc-le-Vieux.

Sprawling file

Their case has been handled for two years by Me Fiodor Rilov, the lawyer specializing in social conflicts at the multinational level. This Monday, September 2, he had an appointment before the industrial tribunal of Sète. One of the 22 procedures initiated throughout the country on behalf of the ex-Camaïeu. All want to have their unfair dismissal recognized by the company Aciam, since liquidated and whose main shareholder was the holding company FIB (Financière immobilière bordelaise), headed by Michel Ohayon (104th place among the largest fortunes in France in 2022 with assets estimated at more than one billion euros, before the fall).
The employees did not attend the hearing chaired by Bertrand Lacabanne on Monday, as the procedure was still at the stage of preparing the file before the court.
But the exchanges between the parties' lawyers are already bitter. On February 12, the Sète industrial tribunal, meeting as a conciliation and orientation office (BCO), ordered the companies targeted in the proceedings (FIB, SAS Multi project investments, SAS Hermione People & Brands and SAS O’Invest) to provide a list of sixteen documents requested by the employees' lawyer, under penalty of a penalty of 500 euros per day. A decision contested by the companies by an appeal for nullity.

Tracing financial flows

For his part, Mr. Fiodor Rilov stated that since the beginning, “80% of the documents had not been provided”. These elements included contracts relating to financial flows between FIB and its subsidiaries, the group's accounting and the business units organization chart of the FIB holding company, to trace the operations that led to a “planned” liquidation of Camaïeu according to Mr. Rilov, convinced that the company's bankruptcy would be “the consequence of fraud”. and that the companies at the head of the holding company “were not only shareholders of Aciam, the owner of the brand, but actually made all the management decisions”.
The defense, for its part, spoke of a “delaying tactic” on the part of Mr. Rilov: “It will never stop”, the FIB lawyer despaired, indicating that a “considerable volume of documents”” had already been communicated to the opposing party. Furthermore, the defenders recalled the context of "great difficulties" the textile market aggravated in 2020 by Covid which led to a premature end of Camaïeu.
A new debate is planned at the industrial tribunal on the documents to be provided on October 21.

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