A69 motorway: Atosca ordered to pay 863,500 euros for non-compliance with environmental obligations

The company in charge of the construction of the highly contested A69 Toulouse-Castres motorway, Atosca, will have to pay 863,500 euros for non-compliance with its obligations concerning the perimeter of the site, declared the Toulouse public prosecutor's office, Monday September 14.

An order dated January 12 required Atosca "to stop the work in progress carried out outside the areas provided for by the initial environmental authorization and to implement certain precautionary measures under penalty", under penalty of having to pay a fine of 20,000 euros per day, summarizes the press release from the public prosecutor's office. However, inspectors from the Biodiversity Office (OFB), responsible for verifying compliance with these measures by the project manager, "found that many requirements of this order were not respected", he notes.

The judge of freedoms and detention (JLD) was therefore seized on June 15 by the Toulouse public prosecutor's office and pronounced, on September 7, "the liquidation of these penalties (...) for a total sum of 863,500 euros". A “completely insufficient” amount, a member of the opposition collective La Voie est libre (LVEL) told AFP. “What we see is that they continue, so in fact they don’t care, it’s not the fines that will stop them,” he continued.

Contacted by AFP, Atosca said it took “note” of the decision, while considering that it had “complied with the prefectural decrees and the order (…) while awaiting administrative regularization by strictly stopping the work on the areas concerned and by carrying out the precautionary measures that it itself proposed”.