"Paris court fines Deliveroo €375,000 for undeclared work", 19 Apr 2022

The Paris Criminal Court issued a €375,000 fine against Deliveroo for abusing the self-employed status of its workers.

The two former directors of the British home delivery company were also given a 12-month suspended prison sentence, a fine of €30,000, and a five-year suspended ban on running a company.

The court’s decision will have to be posted on Deliveroo’s French website for a month.

The sentence corresponds to what the prosecutor requested in March, at the end of a week-long trial that pitted Deliveroo and several of its delivery staff against each other for the first time in criminal court.

The prosecutor considered that the platform is responsible for “an instrumentalisation and misuse of labour regulations” to organise a “systemic concealment” of delivery jobs that should have been salaried and not independent...

... [T]he company “categorically rejects” this decision and recalls that it relates to a past period, stressing that there are “no direct implications for how Deliveroo works with riders today in France or any other market.”

The Deliveroo spokesperson also noted that it is a “difficult decision to understand” as it follows several other civil court decisions covering the same period but confirmed that the company complied with the law...