The agri-food group Avril will know “during July” if the courts validate its offer to take over the Amiens plant of the biochemical company MetEx and part of its commercial and research activities, the latter announced on Monday. The plant has found itself at the centre of attention of candidates in the legislative elections in the Somme.
The Avril group, associated with the investment fund Sociétés de projets industriels (SPI), managed by Bpifrance on behalf of the French State, has submitted an offer for which a hearing at the Paris Commercial Court, presented as final, was scheduled for Monday. If this hearing did indeed take place, the court’s decision, “both concerning Avril’s takeover offer and the conversion into compulsory liquidation” of the Amiens plant and MetEx – which would result from the adoption of the April offer – “should take place during July 2024”MetEx said in a statement, without providing further explanation.
In addition to the Amiens site, which has 280 employees, the takeover offer includes “R&D (research and development) activities essential to its operation (some of which are located in Saint-Beauzire, Puy-de-Dôme), as well as commercial activities” in Paris, Avril said in early June. “In total, 315 jobs are being taken over under this offer.”MetEx said on Monday.
Last Tuesday, the commercial court designated the Belgian company Maash as the buyer of the assets of the group’s other factory, in Carling (Moselle), while maintaining 10 jobs out of 46 in this subsidiary specializing in green chemistry, which produces ingredients by fermentation for the cosmetics, nutrition and materials markets. The Picardy factory is the only one in Europe to produce lysine, an essential amino acid in livestock feed.
In March, the company explained that it was facing “for several months a hostile economic environment linked to a very sharp rise in production costs caused by the soaring prices of raw materials, sugar being the main one”The company also denounces a «dumping» Chinese producers of this essential amino acid, a basic component of proteins necessarily provided by food.
