One more difficulty for French Olympism: 400 days from the Paris Games, the organizing committee (COJO) and other sites were the subject of searches on Tuesday as part of investigations carried out by the Financial Prosecutor’s Office ( PNF).
The public prosecutor confirmed to AFP the information from France TV according to which he had ordered searches at the COJO within the framework of two preliminary investigations.
The first, opened in 2017 and entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses (OCLCIFF), concerns a series of contracts awarded “by several successive contracting authorities linked to the Olympic Games, in particular the COJO and the GIP 2024 “, the bid committee which preceded the OCOG, specified the PNF.
The investigation concerns suspicions of “illegal taking of interests, embezzlement of public funds, favoritism and concealment of favouritism”, according to the public ministry.
Contacted, the Ministry of Sports and the Olympics did not wish to react at this stage.
The large modern and brown facade of the OCOG, in Saint-Denis, is not the only one to have seen the investigators parade Tuesday morning: the search also concerns the Olympic Works Delivery Company (SOLIDEO), in the center-west of Paris and other sites, according to the PNF.
According to the PNF, these searches are indeed also carried out within the framework of a second procedure, opened in 2022 and entrusted to the BRDE, the financial brigade of the Parisian judicial police, for suspicions of illegal taking of interests, favoritism and concealment of favouritism.
“Risks of breach of probity”
It relates, according to the PNF, to several contracts awarded by the OCOG and SOLIDEO, following an inspection by the French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA). According to a source familiar with the matter, this concerns “consulting contracts” on “different subjects”.
According to another source familiar with the matter, one of these two procedures is interested in potential conflicts of interest linked to Édouard Donnelly, executive director of operations of the OCOG who previously had been a provider of the Olympics via his company RNK.
Asked by AFP, the OCOG and SOLIDEO separately confirmed the searches and indicated that they “are cooperating fully with the investigators”.
The COJO is constituted as an association under the 1901 law. The Court of Auditors closely monitors its activity and is due to publish a report very soon.
In April 2021, two AFA reports on the organization of the Olympic Games, of which AFP became aware, pointed to “risks of breaches of probity” and “conflicts of interest”, scratching the image of the “Exemplary” Olympics wanted by the boss of the organizing committee, Tony Estanguet.
The AFA inspectors had considered that the general procedure relating to purchases was “imprecise and incomplete”, and stressed that there were “sometimes situations of uncontrolled potential conflicts of interest”.
In their reports, the AFA inspectors recalled the criminal proceedings against the Presidents of the Brazilian and Japanese Olympic Committees linked to the last two Summer Games (Rio and Tokyo), and also observed that “the risks of harm to the probity are common at major sporting events.
Crisis at the CNOSF
Since the end of the Tokyo Olympics, several arrests and convictions have been made. Again last May, two former officials of a corporate sponsor of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were sentenced to suspended prison sentences by the Japanese courts, as part of a corruption scandal around the event.
These searches are in addition to the crisis that the French Olympic movement has been going through for several months, which culminated with the resignation on May 25 of the president of the French Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF), Brigitte Henriques.
Cross complaints with his predecessor Denis Masseglia have been mentioned.
Rare thing: the International Olympic Committee, generally not very talkative, had even sent a call to order to its French branch, asking it to “focus” on the Paris Olympics and to “stop internal conflicts”.
Tuesday, franceinfo also announced that ten workers who worked at the time without papers on the construction sites of the 2024 Olympics, assigned several building giants, Vinci, Eiffage, Spie Batignolles and GCC, to the industrial tribunal of Bobigny (Seine -Saint-Denis), to obtain the “recognition” of their work and the payment of salary arrears.
A year ago, the Bobigny prosecutor’s office had opened a preliminary investigation for “concealed work” and “employment of foreigners without title in an organized gang” after checks made it possible to identify several irregular workers on an Olympic site.