Читать книгу Mediation - Alain Lempereur - Страница 47

A court commissions a mediator to help find an agreement between a farm in financial difficulty and its creditors. Throughout the course of a session, the mediator realizes, while listening to the farmer, that the latter is confronted by two other conflicts: with his wife in the settling of a divorce, and with his brothers for the succession of their parents' farm. The mediator, feeling that the conflicts are related and knowing that resolving one may help to unfreeze the other, takes on work with the farmer and his wife on the one hand and with the farmer and his brothers on the other hand. They thus arrive at two distinct agreements, one on the divorce and one on the succession. These two conflicts settled, the financial capacities of the farmer improve: an agreement occurs with the creditors to keep up the establishment and restructure the repayment of debts. The resolution of the financial conflict with the creditors results from the prior resolution of the two other disputes.

If there had not been mediation, each conflict would have been managed in an isolated manner: the conflicts regarding divorce and succession would have persisted as much in negotiation as in court. As often happens in cases of bankruptcy, the farm would have been liquidated at a low price, and the creditors would have ultimately been repaid less than what they received in the long‐term agreement allowing for the continuation of agricultural activity.