The trial of Nicolas Best, former director of the Annecy Genevois Hospital Center from 2015 to 2018, ended on Monday, September 2 at the Paris Criminal Court. The court has reserved its decision and will deliver it in a few weeks, on November 25, 2024.
According to the newspaper The Free Midi dated Tuesday, September 3, the courts have requested a prison sentence for the man who, following his time in Annecy, headed the Nîmes University Hospital, from which he was dismissed in November 2023.
Three years in prison, including 6 months in prison, and a suspended fine of 10,000 euros, is precisely the request of the prosecutor of the national financial prosecution service (PNF). It was also requested that Nicolas Best be banned from working in a hospital for four years, including two years suspended, but only in the awarding of public contracts.
Let us recall that Nicolas Best is suspected of having benefited from tickets to shows and dinners offered by Bouygues for an amount of 1500 to 1700 euros. The sum is not high but these invitations were made at the time of choosing public markets. The company is said to have benefited from 35 million excluding tax and to have been illegally allocated land in Annecy. It also paid 9.2 million euros in fines for these facts and was placed under administrative monitoring.
Widespread work-related suffering
In addition, contracts were allegedly awarded in Nîmes and Annecy with a consulting and project management assistance company, the Mupi company, for which the public prosecutor requested a fine of 150,000 euros and a ban on applying for public contracts for two years.
According to Nicolas Best’s defense, this case was the result of “a cabal” led by hospital staff, gathered as a collective, against their director. It also believes that Bouygues’ absence from the trial did not allow Nicolas Best to defend himself properly. An argument that the Court of Cassation had rejected.
The collective, which is no longer active today, also wrote a press release (addressed to our editorial staff) on Monday, September 2, in response to the accusations made by Nicolas Best’s lawyers. It had issued an alert between May 2018 and March 2019, in a context, it wrote, of “generalized suffering at work… and fears regarding the indebtedness” of the establishment.
It states that the “collective has never made the slightest threat to anyone… and that no member has been heard or even summoned by the police or magistrate to answer questions relating to such threats.” He recalls that the CME (medical establishment commission) had requested an administrative inquiry in November 2018 that the State had not deemed “appropriate”.
