20 years later, the scars of the PIP implant scandal are still visible in La Seyne

It's one of the largest public health cases ever brought to justice. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Poly Implant Prosthesis (PIP) company in La Seyne—a top three company at its peak—the scars are still visible in the Playes business park where PIP operated. From 1991 to 2010, the company is believed to have produced approximately 1 million breast implants, the defects of which are said to have claimed 400,000 lives worldwide.

In the final judicial twist in this sprawling and sensational affair, on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, Dominique Lucciardi, 69, widow of Jean-Claude Mas, the founder of PIP (who died in 2019), found guilty of money laundering between 1998 and 2010, was sentenced to a fixed fine of 25,000 euros and a five-year ban on management by the Marseille Criminal Court.

The courts also ordered the confiscation of the Mas-Lucciardi villa in Six-Fours, which it had seized in 2009, then estimated at more than one million euros and occupied by Dominique Lucciardi.

In the Playes business park, the building that housed the breast implant production unit has now been razed. It has reportedly changed hands, and an industrial project is expected to emerge there. But not far away, at the very end of a driveway adjoining a parking lot, remain the ruins of PIP's large administrative and shipping building.

Gutted premises, with broken windows, squatted, and tagged, are a delight for urban exploration enthusiasts who visit abandoned places, as shown in a video posted a month ago on the YouTube channel Terra Découverte.

This site, at the heart of a thriving business park where real estate is scarce, is also waiting to be demolished and decontaminated. To definitively wipe the slate clean of the past.