(Paris) With 400 days to go before the events, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games must face a major first: the organizing committee (Cojo) and other sites were searched on Tuesday in investigations by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF ), which risk tarnishing the image of JO who want to be “exemplary”.
According to the prosecution, one of these preliminary investigations relates to alleged acts of illegal taking of interests, embezzlement of public funds, favoritism and concealment of favouritism; illegal taking of interests, favoritism and concealment of favoritism for the second. All within the framework of contracts linked to the preparation of the Olympic Games.
Contacted, the Ministry of Sports and the Olympics did not wish to react.
The public prosecutor confirmed to AFP the information from France Télévisions according to which he had ordered searches at the Cojo and at other sites. Those carried out at the Cojo ended in the evening, the investigators taking with them in particular “documents related to disputed contracts”, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The search also concerned the Olympic Works Delivery Company (Solideo), responsible for building the permanent works of the Olympic Games, and chaired by the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, according to the PNF.
The first investigation, opened in 2017 and entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Crimes, concerns a series of contracts awarded in particular by “the Cojo and the GIP 2024 [the bid committee which preceded the Cojo ],” the PNF said.
Opened in 2022 and entrusted to the financial brigade of the Paris judicial police, the second procedure relates, according to the PNF, to several contracts awarded by the Cojo and the Solideo. Its launch came after a check by the French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA). According to another source familiar with the matter, this concerns “advisory contracts” on “different subjects”.
According to a third source familiar with the matter, one of these two procedures is interested in potential conflicts of interest linked to Edouard Donnelly, director general of operations of the Cojo who had previously been an Olympic service provider by his company RNK.
Mr Donnelly declined to comment and RNK did not respond to AFP.
Asked by AFP, the Cojo and Solideo indicated that they “fully cooperate with the investigators”.
The Cojo, which often puts forward the fact that it is very controlled, told AFP on Tuesday that it had never been “brought to its attention the slightest reprehensible fact”.
“To ensure the transparency and regularity of hundreds of markets”, he has put in place “demanding procedures” with an audit committee and an ethics committee, he recalled. The ethics committee is chaired by Jean-Marc Sauvé, honorary vice-president of the Council of State.
The International Olympic Committee, for its part, said it was “reassured” to see the Cojo adopt “the only attitude that we are entitled to expect, that is to say transparency”, while refusing to comment on the searches in themselves, according to its director general of the Games, Christophe Dubi.
In April 2021, two AFA reports showed “risks of breaches of probity” and “conflicts of interest”. The AFA inspectors considered that the general procurement procedure was “imprecise and incomplete”, and pointed out that there were “sometimes situations of potential uncontrolled conflicts of interest”.
In their reports, they recalled the criminal proceedings against the presidents of the Brazilian and Japanese Olympic committees linked to the last two Summer Games (Rio in 2016 and Tokyo in 2021), and also observed that “the risks of harm to the probity are common at major sporting events.
Since the end of the Tokyo Olympics, several arrests and convictions have been made. In May, two former officials of a corporate sponsor of the Japanese Olympics received suspended prison sentences in connection with a corruption scandal.
“It’s not necessarily a surprise. There had already been two alerts, one from the AFA and the other from a former member of the Cojo, who had also been dismissed afterwards, ”recalls David Roizen to AFP, expert in public sports policy.
“These searches are catastrophic, they have just lost their credibility, in particular on the duty of exemplarity […]. It will stick with them until the Olympics, ”he analyzes.
These searches are not the only judicial pebble in the shoes of the organizers of the Paris Olympics. On Tuesday, ten workers who worked at the time without papers on the sites of the Olympic Games, assigned several construction giants, Vinci, Eiffage, Spie Batignolles and GCC, to the industrial tribunals of Bobigny (Seine – Saint-Denis), for obtain “recognition” of their work and payment of back wages.