Green light to the resumption of Soft by a consortium, including LDC

RENNES (Reuters) – The sale of all of the group’s activities Mild was assigned Friday by the tribunal de commerce of Rennes, a consortium of mainly the group sarthois LOC and the saudi Almunajem, a major customer of Soft.

In accordance with the offer that he had made and which had the preference of the employees, this consortium, which consists of a total of seven companies, will retain 912 employees, of which 101 subject of mobility, on a total of 1.187 employees.

Offers of redeployment at the LOC, the French leader in poultry, and with the co-operative Terrena, also part of the consortium, will also be offered to some 400 employees, a figure higher than the number of people who could be deprived of employment.

In addition to LOC and Almunajem, which includes the production of frozen chicken to Chateaulin (Finistère), the headquarters of the group Sweet, a new company, Yer Breizh grouping LDC, Terrena, the cooperative Triskalia, Almunajem and the Region of Brittany, which will invest 20 million euros, has joined the consortium and will take over the upstream activities of the value chain: breeding, accouvage and food production.

Two joint ventures made up of the LDC and Terrena, the company’s Poultry of Plouray which has been attributed to the site’s Mild Plouray (Morbihan) and Saria who will take over the production of animal meal to Châteaulin and its 17 employees, complete the consortium selected by the court.

The ministers Jean-Yves Le Drian, Bruno Le Maire, Stéphane Travert and Jacques Mézard welcomed in a joint statement “a recovery of exemplary and founder for the group Mild.”

Bruno Le Maire, minister of Economy and Finance has, inter alia, that this recovery was going to lead to “strengthening of the chain (poultry) over the long term”.

At the hearing of 15 may before the tribunal of commerce, LDC has confirmed that it will invest 55 million euros in the construction of a new site cutting and slaughter of chickens destined for industrial markets, French, Chateaulin.

By 2020, the site will employ 250 people to a slaughter capacity of 400,000 chickens per week.

The offer of the Ukrainian giant MHP, which was also positioned for the resumption of the sites of Chateaulin, Plouray and Quimper, but couldn’t keep that 310 employees, has not been retained.

Lack of complete dossier, the tribunal de commerce of Rennes was not able to consider the offer of the industrial british poultry Chesterfield Poultry, the only candidate for the resumption of the slaughter of Chantonnay (Vendée) and of its 145 employees and two other companies vendéennes the group’s Soft-employing a total of 100 employees.

The group, whose annual losses are estimated at 35 million euros, had been placed on April 4, a company in liquidation.

(Pierre-Henri Allain, edited by Simon Carraud and Matthieu Protard)