Angers companies are fed up of official speeches and worried by the worsening of business

While the electoral campaign for the 2014 municipal elections is entering in a very active period, the business must go on but, for once,  not at all costs. That was the message delivered by most of the employers' organizations on December 11th to the Maine-et-Loire prefet. These, gathered around Joël Freuchet, president of the Medef des Pays de la Loire, pointed out they were fed up with the administrative and fiscal pression on private companies, already weakened by the depressive economic situation.

"We need that the labour code and the taxations be reconsidered as well as the public expenditures,

Credit Pictures : Angers Loire Développement

like we audit them in our own companies", said Zohra Gallard, president of the Angers section of the Confédération générale des petites et moyennes entreprises. One of his colleagues, on behalf the road transport companies complained about "a fiscal and administrative environment which produces jobless people". According to the delegate of the plastic items manufacturing companies, "fiscal reductions are necessary to comfort the companies' capital stocks" and ask a decrease of the state operating expenses "which have to be filtered". All of them complain about the instability of the regulations the companies can't follow.

The dissatisfaction of the Angers business community is also due to a harsh deterioration of the economic situation. The most little companies are not able to redress their turnover and forecast a -2% recession which cmay even reach - 3,5 % in some specific sectors like hotel trade, retail trade, industry and households services. And, according to Mr. Freuchet, some other economic areas, like plastic, construction industry and horticulture face a tough drop of business what makes, morevover, appear a widening gap between public speeches pro-companies and the reality those live on the ground.