10 December 2021

Orange chief executive officer Stéphane Richard will leave his post by the end of January 2022, after he was convicted over his role in a fraud-tainted state payout to the late tycoon Bernard Tapie and given a one-year suspended sentence.

His departure “will be effective once new leadership is in place and no later than January 31”, the company said in a statement.

The 60-year-old Richard is one of several senior officials past and present to be caught up in a decade-old scandal over the US$453m payment made to Tapie in 2008 when the former was working in the French finance ministry.

The scale of the damages won by Tapie in a dispute over the state’s sale of his stake in Adidas sports apparel company sent shockwaves through France and created suspicion that the arbitration panel appointed by then finance minister Christine Lagarde to settle the matter was biased in the tycoon’s favour.

In 2019, the Paris criminal court acquitted Tapie, who died in October this year, of any wrongdoing, along with Richard and three others.

However, the appeal court overturned that ruling, concluding that the arbitration award, which was annulled in 2015, had been “fraudulent”.

Richard, who was Lagarde’s chief of staff, was convicted of complicity in misuse of public funds for advising that the row with Tapie be settled out of court.

The presiding judge said he “committed serious offences in putting the interests of Bernard Tapie above those of the state or the public finances he was tasked with defending.”

She accused him of penalising the state financially and bringing the state into “disrepute”.

Richard, who has been Orange CEO since 2011, said he would appeal the ruling, which included a US$56,000 fine.

“The accusations of complicity in the embezzlement of public funds are without merit and are not based on any evidence,” he said in a statement to AFP.