Former expatriate Méridien executives obtain retirement benefits

The battle is still not over for these former expatriate executives employed by Méridien hotels, deprived of a fair retirement after their years of work in Asia, the United States or the Middle East. The former Air France subsidiary, now owned by the Marriott group, had not or not sufficiently contributed for them to pension funds in France during six or more years of expatriation, from the 1970s to some. On Thursday, September 23, the Paris Court of Appeal, to which these executives, now aged 65 to 84, asked to order the hotel chain to compensate them, dismissed twenty-four plaintiffs and ruled in favor of eleven others for a total amount of 2.8 million euros.

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A first group of 50 other ex-expatriate directors had however, on this same issue, won their case in 2008, a decision confirmed by the Court of Cassation on April 14, 2010: Méridien was obliged to contribute in France for the retirement of its expatriate executives. But, for these other former employees, all the way had to be redone. Five of them died in the meantime.

An “unfair” rejection

For some of the twenty-four rejected cases, the Court of Appeal applied the five-year prescription to their action: these are all those who, having liquidated their retirement before 2008, appealed to the industrial tribunal in 2013. This rejection is , in the eyes of their lawyer, Nicolas Sauvage, “Unfair”. On the one hand, they did not know with certainty that the Méridien group had the obligation to contribute for them only during the judgment of the Court of Cassation, in 2010, “Date from which the five-year limitation period should have started to run”, according to the lawyer. In addition, he adds, “The prejudice of a reduced or no retirement, it is reborn every month and they will suffer it until their death, then their wife after them under the reversion”. According to him, the court should have awarded them “Indemnities for the future” in order to compensate for the harm to which they are victims.

The court rejected other cases, not prescribed but in which it finds insufficient evidence of the relationship of subordination between these former directors and the Méridien chain. The latter pleaded that, if it was indeed she who recruited the executives, their employment contract was then suspended during their period of expatriation. The company therefore considered that these personnel were not its own employees but those of the companies that own the hotels with which a management and consulting contract had been signed.

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