The sanction, which was expected, has just fallen. Houria Aouimeur-Milano, the national director of the wage guarantee scheme, was dismissed for “gross negligence”. Remained confidential until now, this disciplinary measure was notified on February 23, citing “serious breaches”: expensive lifestyle, services concluded in defiance of the rules, etc. The respondent contests the decision and argues, through his lawyers, that it is an act of “retaliations”following the reports it made on serious abuses within the sector in which it operates.
The wage guarantee scheme, known by the acronym AGS, is a unique entity in our social protection system. It ensures the remuneration of women and men employed in companies in difficulty (recovery, liquidation, etc.). The sums are made available to the legal representatives who then redistribute them to the personnel concerned. The governance of the system falls to the “AGS association”, in which sit exclusively representatives of employers’ movements – including the Medef, which has a preponderant weight. The concrete operations are carried out by the Unédic AGS delegation (DUA), which is an “establishment” of Unédic, the association managing unemployment insurance.
Fin 2018, Mme Aouimeur-Milano is appointed head of the DUA. A few months later, an audit carried out by the firm EY revealed malfunctions likely to engage the responsibility of the predecessor of the national director, Thierry Météyé. The latter is accused – among other things – of having attributed in such a way “massive and abnormal” files to a lawyer. He was retired and then fired for gross negligence.
A first series of complaints was filed in March 2019 by several protagonists, including Medef and Unédic, for “theft, corruption and illegal taking of interest”. Very quickly, the suspicions of embezzlement spread to other actors – in particular to administrators and judicial agents who would have been involved in schemes with the former management of the DUA. As a senior management official put it at the time, “We don’t know where the money went” advanced, in certain procedures, to these professionals serving as intermediaries. Another audit is commissioned from the Advolis firm, which wonders regarding the final destination of billions of euros having passed through the hands of legal representatives between 2013 and 2018.
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