Two former leaders of the private group Orpea were placed in pre-trial detention after the opening of a judicial investigation on Thursday, June 29, for breach of trust, fraud, abuse of corporate assets, money laundering in an organized gang and corruption, said on Friday June 30, the Nanterre prosecutor’s office at Agence France-Presse.
These managers are the former chief executive and the former chief financial officer of the group. The former deputy general manager of the group of private accommodation establishments for dependent elderly people (Ehpad) was placed under judicial control. The three men had been taken into custody on Tuesday; they were presented Thursday before the investigating judges of the economic and financial center of the Nanterre court.
A preliminary investigation was opened in May 2022 following complaints filed by the group denouncing internal “embezzlement” “which would have been committed in particular by former senior executives”, said the prosecution in a press release.
A complaint against Orpea’s X filed in April 2022 targeted, according to the company, “past facts and transactions (…) likely to raise questions with regard to Orpea’s corporate interest and discovered following investigations internal”.
Orpea also targeted by several preliminary investigations
According to a survey by Mediapart and the collective of journalists Investigate Europe, published in May 2022, the Luxembourg holding company Lipany, created in 2007, has “accumulated 92 million euros in assets”, “mainly shares in many nursing homes and clinics managed by Orpea”, in France and three other European countries, and “carried out dubious financial operations”.
Lipany is owned, according to Mediapart, by Roberto Tribuno, an accountant and tax adviser who was the boss of Orpea in Italy. This holding company “makes almost no profit and has never distributed dividends”, and its activities are “entirely financed by debt” in a manner “to say the least opaque”, claims the investigative media. “The Orpea group itself suspects that operations carried out with the Luxembourg company would have been used to embezzle money”, underlined Mediapart.
In addition to the judicial information on these embezzlements, Orpea is also the subject of several preliminary investigations, including an investigation for institutional mistreatment and financial offences. The group is also under investigation for “forgery and use of forgery and violation of labor laws by misusing fixed-term contracts”.
The group’s practices had been questioned in journalist Victor Castanet’s investigative book, Les Fossoyeurs, published in January 2022. The book had revealed mistreatment of residents, financial irregularities under the former management, and breaches in Human resources management.
