Fraud “unpublished” at the ticket office. This is one of the conclusions of the interministerial investigation report on the incidents during the Champions League final at the Stade de France, submitted Friday, June 10 to the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne. According to a first count, 2,589 unknown banknotes were scanned at the entrance gates to the Saint-Denis enclosure. Among them, “three notes in particular have been duplicated hundreds of times”says the report.
The three tickets have been reproduced “with a good quality of visual counterfeit on a cardboard support going well beyond the simple photocopy”according the interministerial delegation for major sporting events (DGIES). The same barcode has been duplicated “in one case 760 times, in another 744 times and in a third case 360 times”, says the document. During his hearing in the Senate on June 1, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, had already declared that “several tickets (had) been duplicated hundreds of times”.
Some people “bought very expensive tickets in good faith, thinking they could return to the Stade de France.” others, “naïve or falsely naive bought tickets at the price of 50 euros, despite a price range for this match of 80 to 690 euros”.
Even if the risk of counterfeit notes was known, “However, this is the first time that a fraud of such proportions has been observed”, continues the 30-page document. The Bobigny public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation on May 31 for “organized gang fraud” following the report of the police headquarters for a “massive fraud” counterfeit notes.
According to the report, counterfeit banknotes are partly responsible for “obstruction phenomena” to the pre-filters and at the level of the input tripods, “preventing people in possession of valid tickets from entering the stadium”. “The main trigger results from the massification of a crowd of spectators in the public space at the level of the pre-filtering points, spectators of whom a significant proportion were without tickets or provided with counterfeit tickets”also adds the DGIES.
However, the report calls for “relativize” the version of Gérald Darmanin, who initially mentioned between 30,000 and 40,000 English supporters without tickets or with fake tickets. This figure corresponds “to the deduction between the total volume of people arriving by any means to the Stade de France and the number of spectators counted in the stadium”. But he “there is no possibility of quantifying by category local residents, people passing through and spectators” who used public transport in this area.