Sadri Fegaier, the ex-insurance magnate, sentenced to two years in prison, including 16 months.

Sadri Fegaier, the ex-insurance magnate, sentenced to two years in prison, including 16 months.
Sadri Fegaier, the ex-insurance magnate, sentenced to two years in prison, including 16 months.

Found guilty of having built a system of abusive bank debits, the insurance broker was also fined 300,000 euros. He will also have to compensate the victims. His real estate was seized.

Epilogue to an extraordinary trial. The criminal court sentenced Sadri Fegaier, the former Drôme CEO of SFAM-Indexia, to two years in prison – the maximum sentence – including 16 months and a fine of 300.00 euros, this Tuesday morning, for commercial practices misleading. Six of the companies in its Romans-sur-Isère insurance brokerage group – SARL SFK Group, SFAM Celside Insurance, Foriou, Cyrana, Hubside, Serena – will have to pay fines ranging from 150,000 to 1.5 million euros.

Nearly 2,000 civil parties accuse Sadri Fegaier of having, for nearly 10 years, built a system of abusive bank deductions via insurance contracts for multimedia objects, and a complex procedure to discourage terminations. During the hearing at the end of September, several of the victims took the stand one after the other to recount these wild money grabs from their accounts, for years for some, and sometimes several times in the same month. Anguished and over-indebted, many of them had launched into an exhausting battle to terminate their contract via Sadri Fegaier's telephone advisors. In vain.

In recent years, too, the scam has worn down victims to the point of taking a more violent turn. In March 2023, a spoofed customer was filmed by an employee ransacking the Hubside store in Romans-sur-Isère. And a few months later, in November, another appeared in front of the head office with a can of gasoline in his hand, threatening to immolate himself if he was not reimbursed.

“Omnipresent” in decisions

“Sadri Fegaier was nothing like a strategic business leader who was above the fray. He was alerted personally, in a very serious manner, through different channels, as early as 2016. He took no corrective action” numerous claims, motivated the court in its judgment, drawing the outlines of a manager “omnipresent” at all decision-making levels, even the most subordinate.

After a first fine from the DGCCRF in 2019, the court also specifies, “the group continued its practices by multiplying and diversifying them. No questioning of this delinquent trajectory has ever occurred. It attests to pathological functioning”he explains, noting that the damages – several million euros – in this affair “far exceed the amounts observed in other cases of deceptive commercial practices”.

Lack of repentance

Last September, the distress of the SFAM victims did not cause any particular emotion among the defendant. On the contrary, he was surprised that justice placed full responsibility on him for dysfunctions “at the margins”in his words. “Sadri Fegaier never wanted to admit anything”notes the court this Tuesday. “No questioning, no guilt emanated from his interventions, during which he continued to praise his economic model”and showed a “absence of any repentance”.

Asked in September about the number of complaints left unanswered between 2018 and 2021 – 2,515 -, Sadri Fegaier, always provocative, also justified these failures by “strong growth” of the group, which led to longer response times. “We needed patches from time to time”added the former youngest billionaire in , whose dazzling success still enchanted ten years earlier.

Opposite, prosecutor Anne Proust had highlighted all the skepticism and anger aroused by Sadri Fegaier's attitude, requesting the maximum sentence against him. Rare fact: at the end of his requisitions, the public prosecutor received a standing ovation from the civil parties in the courtroom.

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