The case involves telecommunications giant Orange, which at the period of time in question, 2008 and 2009, was called France Telecom. The BBC said that, in 2006, the then-president, Didier Lombard, announced plans to cut 22,000 jobs and move another 14,000 workers after being privatized two years earlier. An internal document found that he said he would do this one way or another whether "through the window or through the door." An article from 2009 in the United Kingdom's Independent noted that French labor laws make it difficult to do these kinds of mass firings, and so the company is said to have turned to bullying tactics to make working there so unbearable that people would just decide to quit. According to the AP, this meant the company did things like imposing “excessive and intrusive control” on employees, assigning workers to demoralizing tasks, failing to provide training, isolating staff and using “intimidation maneuvers or threats and pay cuts.”

For instance, according to the Irish Times, employees who refused to quit would be uprooted and transferred to distant parts of the country (the BBC noted one woman was transferred three times in one year before killing herself), assigned to positions they weren't trained for, demoted from prestigious jobs to answering phones in call centers, or even deprived of chairs.

One suicide, a 50-year-old man, explicitly named working conditions at France Telecom as the reason he took his own life, his note citing “the permanent sense of urgency, overwork, absence of training, the total disorganization of the company” plus “management by terror.” Another, a 53-year-old father, did so while on the phone with two union delegates. One of the attempts was a 37-year-old woman who tried to kill herself in front of her supervisors after being told she was to be transferred. Another 52-year-old prepared to leap from his window but made enough noise in the attempt that he was caught. 

The company at the time said that these suicides were isolated incidents, and had nothing to do with working conditions at the company, with the president at the time dismissing it as a trend—for which he received massive condemnation from the public at large. Lombard himself has remained defiant, with his attorney saying there was no way he could have known the psychological states of all 100,000 employees, said the AP. The prosecutors, for their part, do not directly blame the defendants for the suicides, but rather argue that the method of personnel management affected various employees with an increase of psychological-social risk.