how Brussels obtained the sacrifice of the transport operator

End of game for Fret SNCF. Next January, two companies whose names were revealed on Monday will replace the leader in rail freight transport in France: Hexafret, which will run these trains, and Technis, which will take care of locomotive maintenance. The culmination of a long process: while Fret SNCF came out of two financial years (2021 and 2022) in the green after twenty-five years in the red, the European Commission launched a procedure against the French State at the beginning of 2023. It claimed that the public authorities had unduly compensated each year for the losses of its subsidiary, a freight specialist. Indeed, to the extent that the rail freight transport market had been open to competition in France since 2006, Brussels considered that this was a distortion of competition. And demanded the reimbursement of the 5.3 billion advances by Fret SNCF. Enough to kill this operator and make jobs disappear…