Computer data has been seized during searches at the Luxembourg premises of tyre manufacturer Goodyear, prosecutors said on Thursday, as part of an investigation into allegations that defective tyres produced by the company had caused fatal accidents.
Police removed “a lot of computer data which will be able to be used by investigators”, said Etienne Manteaux, prosecutor in the French city of Besançon, news agency AFP reported.
It followed searches on Tuesday and Wednesday at Goodyear premises in France, Luxembourg and at the company’s European headquarters in Brussels.
Goodyear can still file a legal challenge against the seizures, Manteaux said during a press conference on Thursday. “The handing over of the seals to French investigators will therefore be subject to validation of the seizures carried out by a judge in Luxembourg and Belgium,” he said.
The searches followed a series of allegations about the safety of tyres produced by the manufacturer at its Luxembourg site in Colmar-Berg.
A series of articles in the French daily newspaper Le Monde in April alleged that the company compensated dozens of accident victims in the 2010s while demanding their silence.
The prosecutor said that it was regrettable that in a certain number of accidents “we cannot define the actual brand of the tyre which burst and given the age of the case, all these seals have been destroyed”.
“Often the bursting of a tyre is seen as the result of bad luck or a sudden puncture,” he noted, which could lead to certain cases being closed after accidents.
Last year, the TV station Arte broadcast a report entitled “Sophie Rollet against Goodyear”. In 2014, Sophie Rollet’s husband was killed when the front left tyre of his truck burst. In 2015, the public prosecutor put the matter on file.
Earlier this week a spokesperson for Goodyear confirmed the searches and said the company is co-operating fully with the authorities.
“We understand that this is in connection with an ongoing investigation in France concerning a special exchange programme for truck tyres that Goodyear carried out ten years ago,” the spokesperson said.
In a statement in response to the claims to the Luxemburger Wort in April, a company spokesperson said: “Nothing is more important to Goodyear than the safety and quality of its products and the people who use them.”
Goodyear said that ten years ago it “proactively initiated a programme to replace a specific category of truck tyres sold at the time in response to market feedback.”
This programme was “carried out rigorously and transparently in coordination with the relevant authorities” to replace as many tyres as possible, the manufacturer said.
The world’s third-largest tyre-maker, Goodyear is the seventh-largest employer in Luxembourg, with around 3,500 staff at its plants in Colmar-Berg, Dudelange – where it opened a second factory in 2022 – and offices on the site of a future automotive research campus in Bissen.
(This article was originally published by AFP. Translation, editing and additional reporting by John Monaghan)