New twist in the legal battle between the former employees of Alpine Aluminum and the buyers of the Scop sold in December 2019. The lawyer for the company Samfy Invest, the main buyer, announced this weekend that he was going to appeal of the decision of the Commercial Court of Annecy. This court, which decided on Friday to cancel the sale of the company specializing in the transformation of aluminum and based in Cran-Gevrier, on the grounds that the buyers had not respected their commitments, namely to take over 49 of the 85 employees and maintain activity on the site.
Develop activities related to aluminum processing
“The group wants to demonstrate that it is capable of making this site a job-generating site“, explains Brice Lacoste, the lawyer of Samfy Invest.To also do something clean, and not an industrial site in the old sense of the term.“And according to him, this will necessarily involve the development of activities ancillary to the transformation of aluminium.”An identical activity cannot generate employment, because the aluminum sector is currently in bad shape in the French economy. To say that tomorrow the site will be the same as before but better is not credible.“
A site conversion project which would also be slowed down by a decree from the Haute-Savoie prefecture makes Brice Lacoste understand. This decree has been in force since May and prohibits access to certain parts of the site, considered to be polluted. It is therefore impossible to offer these plots to companies that would like to come and set up and therefore create jobs. The depollution of the Alpine Aluminum wasteland is still in progress, an operation in which Samfy Invest would have already spent nearly eight million euros according to class counsel.