[Scorcher]

This is quite shocking, Renault expected falsely accused executives who got fired to commit suicide. They even prepared a press release beforehand which said,

"The entire company is profoundly shaken by the seriousness of this act. Our thoughts are with the family of Mr. XXX" (which would later be filled in with the name of the deceased).

Renault fired three executives - Michel Balthazard, Matthieu Tenenbaum and Bertrand Rochette - over allegations that they were selling electric vehicle trade secrets to Chinese companies. French authorities eventually launched their own investigation and cleared all three suspects. Renault was forced to admit fault and several people with ties to the scandal were reassigned or demoted.

Source

[johnjacob]

Maybe a little tangential, but this reminds me of 2007 when I visited France for a short project. I was staying in Versailles and working at Nortel's office in Chateaufort. Since Chateaufort was an out-of-the-way location with no metro/train connectivity, Nortel provided a bus service from Versailles.

On the way to and from work everyday, we would pass a building called "Renault Technocentre". And one day while I was casually talking with one of my colleagues in the bus, he mentioned that there had been many Renault employees working in the Technocentre had committed suicide, apparently because of the extremely high work pressure. It seems the newspapers had carried articles on it.

Of course, there is a difference between committing suicide because of high work pressure, and committing suicide because of being falsely accused. Some portion of the blame goes to the company in either case, but much more so in the latter case.

[di1in]

How can company marcomm go this crazy ? Perhaps someone played them into making a fool of themselves..

[samyakmodi]

i am sure there is more depth to it.

there are chances that the executives might have said that they would commit suicide if found guilty - so the company might have drafted a statement like that being confident that they were guilty indeed.

never the less - no justification for this.

[drsingh]

Its just a standard press release by their PR department. In case of accidents, suicides,mass firings,product recalls.

In today's scenario of hyper media ,I guess every corporation keeps these to send out as soon as possible after the incident.

[noopster]

@Scorcher- while what you have posted is very valid, the main story in my opinion is that 3 executives were falsely accused of spying. Subsequent to them being cleared by the French authorities, Renault has been forced to apologise and reinstate the sacked employees and take action on those who botched up the internal investigation.

Three Renault internal investigators were fired and Chief Operating Officer Patrick Pelata has resigned in the wake of an unfounded industrial spying case levied against the French automaker. Along with Pelata's voluntary demotion from his Number 2 post, six other well-placed executives will also be reassigned.

As drsingh rightly said, companies have boilerplate PR templates to cover any eventuality and the "revelation" that Renault expected its executives to off themselves seems to be typical press sensationalism with an element of nudge-nudge-wink-wink as if to insinuate that the company deliberately frame the employees in question. While this is very much possible, it has yet to be proved.

I am altering the thread title to reflect this.