Fnac Darty was inflicted 3.9 million euros fine earlier this week by the repression of frauds due to “delays in the payment of invoices from its suppliers”, but the group affirms to AFP on Wednesday that “these decisions” will “dispute” before the competent courts “.
In detail, it is both “Fnac Darty Participations et Services” and “Darty & Son” which were sanctioned by the Directorate General for Competition, Consumption and the Repression of Frauds (DGCCRF), each for the same reason and a similar amount of 1.95 million euros.
Fnac Darty claims that the controls that led to the sanctions date back to the era of the Pandemic of COVID-19: “An exceptional context which does not seem to have been fully taken into account”, deplores the group in a reaction transmitted to AFP, recalling the “strong disorganization” which had marked this period.
The group also questions the amount of fines imposed by the DGCCRF, citing several examples of reduced sanctions before the administrative courts after taking into account the context and the disturbances caused by the Pandemic of the COVID-19.
Recurring problem, inter -company payment delays are liable to an administrative fine of a maximum amount of 2 million euros.
In 2024, these delays deteriorated “significantly in France” and returned “above the European average”, the Banque de France said in early July, with an average delay of 13.6 days last year.
“Only 50% of large companies pay today without delay. In the absence of these delays, SMEs would have benefited from 15 billion euros in additional cash in 2024,” said the Banque de France.
Faced with what sometimes constitutes substantial holes in the cash of certain SMEs, the current maximum amount of the fine is deemed insufficiently dissuasive by the executive.
In mid-July, Prime Minister François Bayrou has announced that he wanted to tighten the sanctions by imposing on companies that are slow to settle their business partners a financial punishment that can go “up to 1% of turnover”, in order to “end practices that weaken our economic fabric”.
According to him, it is “one of the fundamental problems with which companies and in particular SMEs are faced”.
The mediators of the company and the credit had also spoken earlier in the year in favor of such a measure.
Posted on August 6 at 1:19 p.m., AFP
