Orpea unscrew on the stock market after the denunciation of serious failures in her nursing homes

Elderly "rationed" people, abandoned in their excrement or left without care for days: the publication of a survey book denounced the obsession with profitability within the private group of retirement homes Orpea led to a brutal fall on Monday on MondayFrom its course to the Paris Stock Exchange.

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The title of the French group, manager of private clinics and retirement homes, lost more than 16%, before its rating was suspended, at the request of the company.Orpea challenged on Monday afternoon in a statement all the accusations, which he considers "false, outrageous and detrimental".

The group is implicated in the book Les Fulfiéurs, by journalist Victor Castanet, to be published on Wednesday at Fayard, and whose world published on Monday the "good sheets".The author describes a system where hygiene care, medical care, or even meals of residents are "rationed" to improve the profitability of the.An auxiliary of life, whose author has collected testimony, tells for example how she had to "fight to obtain protections" for residents."We were rationed: it was three layers a maximum day.And not one more.It does not matter that the resident is sick, that he has a gastro, that there is an epidemic.No one wanted to know anything, ”says this woman in the gravediggers.

And this while stays are billed at a high price - nearly 6,500 euros per month for an "entry -level" room at the "Les Bords de Seine" residence in Neuilly, points the author.However, the retirement homes, even private, benefit from significant public funding, on the part of the State and the departmental councils, underlines the journalist, for whom "at least indirectly, part of this public money is not goingfor the benefit of the elderly "."I obtained testimonials according to which these dysfunctions found their origin in a policy of reduction of costs implemented at a high level" of the company, summed up the author with AFP.

The book also returns to the conditions of the death of the writer Françoise Dorin in January 2018, from a badly treated snail, less than three months after entering one of the establishments of the Orpea group.

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The quality "always" placed "before the financier"

"Such attacks are unfortunately not new but are extremely violent in a context where our teams have been even more mobilized for two years by the health crisis," deplores Orpea, who indicates that he seized his lawyers to give "all the consequences, includingon the judicial level ", to the publication of the book in order to" restore the truth of the facts ".

"We have always placed the quality before the financier," also defended himself during a press briefing the director general of the group, Yves Le Masne.According to him, the dependent testimonies identified in the book come from a minority of former collaborators of the company who fed a "resentment" against him after having left him.For his part, the director general for France, Jean-Christophe Romersi, formally denied the accusations relating to supposed rations, in particular the hygienic protections of the residents."We have never asked for the slightest rationing.There has never been a question of sacrificing the slightest care, it does not correspond to our directives or our values, "he insisted.

Irregularity in recruitment

Management also had to respond to other charges published on Monday, this time by Mediapart: according to the online investigation media, the group committed frequent irregularities in the recruitment of its employees on fixed -term contracts, mentioning on their contract,as a reason for hiring, the replacement of employees on permanent contracts, who, in fact, "would not exist"."This is false, there have never been false employment contracts," replied Yves Le Masne on Monday, for whom the company has no interest in favoring hiring on fixed -term contracts.In a recurring context of staff shortage, it is often the employees themselves who refuse a permanent contract to keep their freedom, according to him.

The stock market storm launched by the publication of this work also affected other private groups managing retirement homes: during the session, the title Korian lost more than 14% and that of the health more than 5%, inA globally in very sharp decrease market by almost 4%.

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