SFR fined 860,000 euros for late payments

Telecommunications operator SFR has been fined €860,000 for late payments to its suppliers, the DGCCRF announced on Monday, August 11.

"These delays were discovered (...) as part of an investigation launched by the DGCCRF into compliance with the rules of the commercial code regarding payment deadlines," said the DGCCRF (General Directorate for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control).

According to the company, this sanction results from a "very limited number of invoices" referring to 175 payments concerned in 2022, "compared with the hundreds of thousands of invoices honored by SFR each year."

At the beginning of August, several fines against French companies based on the same grounds were already made public by the fraud squad.

The online retailer CDiscount was fined €2.1 million, and the Fnac Darty group was fined €3.9 million for late payments.

A recurring problem: late payments between companies increased again in 2024, and deteriorated "significantly in France", returning "above the European average", the Banque de France indicated at the beginning of July, with an average delay of 13.6 days last year.

"Only 50% of large companies currently pay on time. In the absence of these delays, SMEs would have benefited from €15 billion in additional cash flow in 2024," stated the Banque de France.

Faced with what sometimes constitute significant holes in the cash flow of certain SMEs, the current maximum amount of fines is deemed insufficiently dissuasive by the executive.

In mid-July, Prime Minister François Bayrou announced that he wanted to toughen sanctions by imposing financial penalties of up to 1% of turnover on companies that are late in paying their trading partners, in order to put an end to practices that are weakening our economic fabric.