Meet Goodyear's worst nightmare. Christian Duc has a very specific profession: He is a tire engineer. A Michelin employee until 2011, he became a legal expert later in his career. This is how he came to be called in by the judicial police for an accident that occurred on April 25, 2016, on the A13 freeway, near Ecquevilly in the Paris region. As often since the early 2010s, when Goodyear's Marathon LHS II (and later LHS II+) tires were produced in Luxembourg, a burst front left tire caused a truck to lose control. On that day, as on so many others before it, the vehicle fell on its side on the roadway and crashed through the safety barrier, killing the driver. The tire involved? A Marathon.

Three years later, on April 3, 2019, Duc submitted his conclusions to the courts. They were crystal clear. "Between 2011 and 2016," he began, "there were many accidents involving Goodyear front tires." But, continued the expert, "Goodyear carried out tire withdrawals. (...) We can't rule out that the left front tire could present a similar source of degradation to these withdrawn tires, even if the dates or dimensions aren't exactly identical." He concluded: "The deterioration of the tire is the result of premature degradation linked to its internal structure [and] deep and advanced internal destructuring. (...) There is no external cause." In just a few sentences, the expert had (re)launched the Goodyear affair. This umpteenth accusatory report, however, had yet to panic the French judicial or administrative authorities.

The multinational's executives were well aware that the Marathon LHS II and LHS II+ had been involved in a number of road accidents, as evidenced by a secret document obtained by Le Monde. While there is no proof that it is exhaustive, it does give an idea of the extent of the damage. It is an Excel spreadsheet prepared on October 19, 2017, by Grégory Boucharlat, commercial vice president for Goodyear Europe. It gives a sense of the situation: In Spain alone, 158 accidents were recorded, with total compensation estimated at €3,381,881. In the Netherlands, 8 incidents occurred between May 2015 and July 2016, resulting in damages of €1,317,898. In France, 81 accidents were recorded between July 2013 and December 2016, with compensation ranging, depending on the case, from €150 to €75,000.

According to this spreadsheet, the July 2014 accident near the northern French town of Roye, which killed Luis Lesmes, an executive with the Anglo-Swiss company Glencore, had already cost Goodyear more than €964,000 in procedural costs alone. The case was the subject of a judicial investigation at the Amiens court and civil proceedings in Nanterre. The civil case eventually led to a discreet settlement in London, in the form of a colossal payment to Lesmes's widow (several dozen million euros, Le Monde has learned).

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