PARIS (Reuters) – A French investigating judge on Wednesday decided to indict Vinci Construction Grands Projets, a subsidiary of the Vinci group, suspected of having imposed degrading working conditions on workers on construction sites in Qatar, which organizes the FIFA World Cup from November 20, said the NGO Sherpa.
Vinci had refuted these accusations on Monday, when the announcement of the summons of its subsidiary to justice, while stressing that it had not built any stadium or hotel for the World Cup.
“Vinci Constructions Grands Projets will immediately file an appeal to have the Versailles Investigation Chamber pronounce the nullity of this indictment”, supported Me Jean-Pierre Versini-Campinchi, the lawyer for the construction group on Monday. .
The charges against the company QDVC, in which Vinci Construction Grands Projets holds a 49% stake – forced labour, servitude, human trafficking, work incompatible with human dignity, deliberate endangerment, involuntary injuries – , date back to the first half of the 2010s.
A first complaint filed by the Sherpa organization on March 24, 2015 was dismissed on January 31, 2018. Sherpa then filed a complaint with civil action on September 25, 2018 with an anonymous witness cited in the initial complaint of 2015.
Sherpa and another NGO, the Committee against Modern Slavery (CCEM), again announced in November 2018 the filing of a new complaint for forced labor, reduction in servitude, trafficking in human beings, work incompatible with human dignity. , deliberate endangerment, unintentional injuries and concealment.
“We welcome this indictment. This is the first time that a parent company has been indicted on these grounds for the activities of one of its branches abroad. The magistrate is sending a strong signal for the economic actors: “You can be responsible for what happens in your subsidiaries,” said Sandra Cossart, director of Sherpa France, on Wednesday.
(Written by Tangi Salaün and Nicolas Delame with contributions from Juliette Jabkhiro, edited by Matthieu Protard and Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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