The sulphurous Société Française d’Assurances Multirisks, SFAM, is cornered on all sides and could soon find itself in liquidation, to the great dismay of its aggrieved customers and its employees.
Clouds are gathering over Indexia Group, better known as Société Française d’Assurances Multirisks, or SFAM, an affinity insurance brokerage for multimedia devices, which is currently the subject of several complaints and could very soon find itself in receivership, or even compulsory liquidation. Founded by businessman Sadri Fegaier in 1999, SFAM experienced rapid expansion from 2016 which resulted in a diversification of its activities, particularly in the sale of multimedia products, such as smartphones or speakers. , via its subsidiary Hubside Store, whose stores have mushroomed since 2020 (see our article). But what could have been “success stories” French entrepreneurial approach turned out to be a much less rosy story, against a backdrop of “misleading and aggressive” commercial practices, in the words of the UFC-Que Choisir association.
From 2016 and for years, the SFAM has in fact worked to re-sell, there is no other term, insurance products for multimedia devices, in particular smartphones, to customers of major retail brands. distribution, such as Fnac-Darty, with which they had established commercial partnerships. Concretely, when purchasing a product, the salespeople in these stores were strongly encouraged to offer customers attractive partial reimbursement offers, which were conditional on taking out an insurance contract with the SFAM. The problem is that these conditions and contracts were not always clearly explained to buyers, who subscribed to them without really being aware of it and then found themselves deducted sums ranging from around fifteen to more than sixty euros per month.
SFAM affair: a trial for a foretold end
But things don’t stop there. In addition to selling insurance products in a less than transparent manner, SFAM is also accused by many plaintiffs of having made the contract termination process excessively difficult, or even knowingly ignoring termination requests. As a result, some customers continued to be charged regularly even though they had duly completed all the necessary steps to cancel their insurance. Worse, the company has been singled out several times for having unilaterally set up new contracts with former clients whose bank details it still had, which led to wild and abusive direct debits for many people, like us. the relationships in this article. If this dubious practice seems to be on the rise since January 2024, it is perhaps because the SFAM finds itself up against the wall, at the same time subject to a ban on marketing any new insurance contract for a year, and being the subject of complaints from several creditors for astronomical sums.
Firstly, Urssaf Rhône-Alpes is demanding from the company more than 11 million euros in arrears of social security contributions, to which are added more than one million euros which would be owed to the tax authorities. Then, many SFAM employees would be victims of “delays” in the payment of their salaries and bonuses for several months, with the catastrophic individual consequences that we imagine for the people concerned. Finally, a class action bringing together several hundred former customers who consider themselves wronged by the company’s commercial practices, and are demanding reimbursements, is added to the list of grievances. Cornered on all sides, the SFAM is therefore in the hot seat, and its fate could be sealed in the coming days. Indeed, on April 24, the Paris commercial court will have to rule on the complaint from Urssaf Rhône-Alpes, and could decide to place the company in receivership, or even outright liquidation.
If this hearing will perhaps put an end to this bad farce which has lasted for almost ten years now, its outcome risks, on the other hand, not satisfying all the injured parties and leaving certain complainants in the lurch. In the event of compulsory liquidation, all of the company’s assets would be sold and the sums thus collected would be redistributed among the various creditors. Unfortunately, in view of the amounts claimed by the various plaintiffs, it is unlikely that the transfer of assets will cover all the claims. In such cases, the judicial liquidator is then forced to carry out arbitration between the different creditors, with priority given to employees and public bodies. If the liquidation should be pronounced next week, there is therefore a good chance that former customers will be among the last served, and that a good number of them will never obtain reimbursement of the sums unduly taken from their account …