Criminal liability in maintenance

To be criminally liable is to be found guilty of an offence: you have committed a prohibited act, or failed to perform an obligatory act, and a text stipulates that, in this case, you are liable to a fine or imprisonment.

The maintenance manager is directly concerned by a large number of texts of this nature. They must ensure the safety of the people they supervise, to avoid being prosecuted for manslaughter or unintentional bodily harm, as well as the safety of external employees, while not exercising hierarchical authority over the latter, on pain of committing the offence of bargaining.

From charybdis to scylla, the maintenance manager has to try and stay organized so as not to sail at a loss. The aim of this article is to help him in this task.

The maintenance manager is only personally concerned by criminal liability, i.e. the risk of being fined out of his or her savings (his or her company is not entitled to pay on his or her behalf, barring a few exceptions), or even of serving a prison sentence (a very rare occurrence, as most operational staff on an industrial site are "only" liable to a suspended prison sentence).

In practice, the maintenance manager is not directly concerned by civil liability. Only his or her company may be ordered to pay damages to third parties in the event of damage caused to customers (company products or services with quality defects) or local residents (neighborhood nuisance).