A metal structure installation company and its legal representative appeared on Tuesday, February 1, 2022 following a work accident that occurred in Anneville-sur-Scie in July 2014. An employee was injured after falling from a roof.
In this case, the defendant has at heart to defend himself. This entrepreneur from Pas-de-Calais, who has been in the business for more than 40 years, immediately expresses what he expects from the audience: “I’m sorry to disturb the court but I want to explain myself, I want you to understand what happened. » So he goes to the bar with a lot of construction equipment: a harness, ropes, a sample of plastic plates and iron sheet. Talkative and very technical in his explanations, he replays the scene of the accident by putting himself in the shoes of the employee. Thus, he puts on the safety harness and says: “It was a question of going up a roof and the worker fell 11 m. But there are several things that bother me. »
The miraculous victim
When help arrived on July 2, 2014, the employee was lying in a pool of blood on his head. He will miraculously come out of it with an ITT of 10 days and will be able to return to work two months later. The first investigations made it possible to establish that the lifeline, which made it possible to secure the workers, was severed. “Someone Cut It” assures the defendant. “Maybe because they weren’t tied up well and didn’t want to be fussed over. I was told that the one who fell had his harness on but he was not properly attached to the anchor point”, continues the defendant. The public prosecutor then postponed the proceedings: “That’s not really the question. Upstream, a basket, a net or scaffolding would have been needed to ensure the safety of the workers,” assures the deputy prosecutor by taking up the regulations on work at height. In front of this “manifestly deliberate breach of a security obligation”, it requires a fine of €7,000 for the legal person and €5,000 including €4,000 suspended for the natural person.
“Defend your professional honor”
“Today, my client is coming to defend his professional honor”, then declared Me Cohen of the Paris Bar. “Otherwise, why would he have refused the criminal composition which condemned him to pay a fine of €1,500? » For him, the report of the labor inspector is full of errors. Believing that his client is the victim of relentlessness, he affirms that the workers worked well on a nacelle but that the employee in question went to walk on a work where he was not supposed to go. “Besides, the victim is not coming to justice, he knows very well that he was reckless”, he concludes.
After deliberation, the court decided to release the defendant and the company as a legal person.
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