Death of a worker on a Grand Paris Express construction site: the directors of a construction company sentenced

The colossal construction site of the Saint-Denis Pleyel station, which will eventually house the tangle of four metro lines, extended over nine levels, four of which are underground. On level -3, Joao Baptista Fernandes Miranda, an Eiffage employee, was "doing his job as usual" on January 5, 2022, wearing his safety equipment, the prosecutor recalled in early April. From the upper floor, the metal plate hit him in the head. The death of this 60-year-old man was pronounced at 12:34 p.m. He is one of the five workers who died on Grand Paris Express construction sites.

The current president of Sampieri Construction, a subcontractor of Eiffage, who at the time of the events was a worker for this company, was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended, and fined €10,000. The court considered that the removal of a 300 kg steel plate had been carried out at his request on this construction site at the Saint-Denis-Pleyel station .

The father of this first defendant, a director of the company at the time of the incident, was sentenced to a six-month suspended sentence and a €3,000 fine for involuntary manslaughter, despite being absent from the scene on the day of the accident. The company was fined €40,000. While the fines imposed were lower than the demands, the court upheld the prosecution's request regarding prison sentences.

"In court, I heard from the defendants 'it's a tragedy' but at no point did I hear 'I'm sorry for you for what happened,'" the lawyer for the civil parties lamented in early April. "There are three fatal accidents at work every day, in all professions," recalled Marion Ménage, lawyer for the CGT FNSCBA, representing construction workers.

"It's something systemic that deserves to be known and spoken about," she said. Construction workers "are not professionals who complain, but people who work extremely hard and in extremely difficult conditions."