PARIS (Reuters) – The Orpea group said on Wednesday, in response to press reports, that it had filed a complaint against X with the public prosecutor in April for potentially criminal acts involving individual behavior.
Following a joint investigation, Mediapart and the collective of journalists Investigate Europe published in the morning on their respective sites an article according to which a parallel structure Orpea, based in Luxembourg, would have carried out dubious financial operations and accumulated 92 million euros. euros in assets in four European countries, including France.
Orpea indicated that the facts to which Mediapart and Investigate Europe alluded did not concern “in any way the reception and care of residents” in its retirement homes.
On the Paris Stock Exchange, the title lost 24.02% around 4:00 p.m.
Since the beginning of the year, Orpea has seen its shares fall by around 70% after the publication in January of the investigative book “Les Fossoyeurs”, in which its author, the journalist Victor Castanet, denounces the negligence of the group and the mistreatment of elderly people in some of its establishments.
The government announced at the end of March that it had filed a complaint against Orpea to request the reimbursement of public grants, amounting to several tens of millions of euros, the use of which, according to it, had been diverted.
Orpea then declared that while the government report “highlights certain dysfunctions”, it also allows the conclusion “that there is no organized system at Orpea which would lead to mistreatment”.
The manager of retirement homes and nursing homes has repeatedly rejected the existence of systemic malfunctions and denied the “particularly serious” accusations published in “Les Fossoyeurs”.
(Report Diana Alvarez Mandia and Sudip Kar-Gupta, French version Laetitia Volga, told by Jean-Michel Blot)