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A Decade Ago, Suicides Rocked A French Telecom Firm. Now Its Execs Stand Trial

Prosecutors accuse former executives and managers at France Télécom of "moral harassment" or complicity during a major restructuring.
Union members gather in front of a Paris courthouse on May 6, as several former senior employees of the then-named company France Télécom go on trial for alleged "moral harassment," a decade after a series of suicides occurred at the firm between 2008 and 2009.

One morning in 2011, Rémy Louvradoux went to his management job at the French telecommunications company where he had worked for 30 years. At 7 a.m., alone in the parking lot of his office near Bordeaux, in southwestern France, he killed himself.

His son, Raphael Louvradoux, told the news site L'Obs that his father wrote the company a letter two years before taking his life.

"He explicitly said that not only was it the fault of France Télécom's managerial policies, but that suicide was the only solution," he said.

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