Fiber Excellence: Carole Delga announces a completed offer and requests temporary nationalization

The president of the Occitanie region, Carole Delga, announced the submission on Thursday evening of a “completed” offer to take over the Fiber Excellence pulp mill in Saint-Gaudens (Haute-Garonne), after the arrival of a new investor, and asked for four more months to “finalize” it. In order to be able to obtain this new deadline, Carole Delga asks President Emmanuel Macron again to “temporarily nationalize Fiber Excellence, by returning to the capital of the company, as the Occitanie region will do from Monday”, she wrote during the night from Thursday to Friday on X.

The offer, filed Thursday at the Toulouse commercial court, which must examine it at a hearing on September 8, “is based on a new investor, in the sector of paper pulp and hygiene products,” she specifies. According to Carole Delga, this investor, who visited the site on Tuesday, is asking for a further period of four months “to transform this expression of interest into a firm offer”.

No nationalization, even temporary

On Thursday, the Minister of Industry, Sébastien Martin, ruled out the option of nationalization, even temporary, of the Saint-Gaudens factory. Carole Delga made this request for the first time on Wednesday, due to the lack of an immediate solution to take over the factory. Fiber Excellence, which owned the last two large pulp mills in France, in Saint-Gaudens and Tarascon (Bouches-du-Rhône), was placed in receivership at the end of April.

After injecting nearly 300 million euros into the group, its Indonesian shareholder Jackson Wijaya threw in the towel in the spring, highlighting the company's lack of profitability. The Toulouse commercial court rejected on July 27 the offer to take over the entire group, presented by financier Matthieu Pigasse, with support from the Occitanie and Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur regions. On July 30, he granted a new deadline to Soprema, one of the world leaders in waterproofing, to formalize a takeover plan for the Saint-Gaudens factory and placed the Tarascon site in liquidation.