Police search Paris 2024 Olympic Games offices in corruption investigation
French police on Tuesday searched the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games organizing committee and other offices as part of two corruption investigations into contracts signed in connection with the Games, prosecutors said.
While the scope and nature of the investigations were not entirely clear on Tuesday, the investigations threatened to tarnish the image of integrity and transparency that authorities overseeing the Paris 2024 plans had tried to project, following a series of previous Olympic bids which were riddled with corruption charges.
The offices of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern Paris suburb, and that of a separate agency responsible for games infrastructure, in western Paris, were both searched by investigators, according to the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office.
The prosecutor’s office, which deals with high-level financial crimes, said the searches were conducted as part of two separate investigations, both investigating potential conflicts of interest, embezzlement and favoritism.
The first, opened in 2017, covers procurement contracts signed by the Organizing Committee of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, responsible for the planning, organization and financing of the Games, in partnership with Paris City Hall, the International Olympic Committee and the French Sports Federation. authorities.
The second opened in 2022 following an inspection conducted by the French Anti-Corruption Bureau, an official government watchdog. It relates to procurement contracts signed by the organizing committee and by SOLIDEO, a body overseeing the permanent construction of the Games that currently oversees 58 Olympic and Paralympic projects, according to the company website.
The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office did not provide further details on the nature of the contracts.
In 2021, the news agency This is reported by Agence France-Presse that a confidential report from France’s anti-corruption agency on the organization of the Paris 2024 games had warned of the “risks of impropriety” and “conflicts of interest” in the process.
Representatives from the organizing committee and SOLIDEO confirmed the searches, but gave no further details, saying only that they were “fully cooperating” with investigators.
Next year’s Olympic Games will be held from July 26 to August 11 and the Paralympic Games from August 28 to September 6. The games are expected to attract more than 10,000 athletes and millions of spectators, in a very different atmosphere than the previous ones. which were held in Tokyo in 2021 under strict Covid-related protocols.
In January, the Cour des Comptes, France’s national control agency, estimated that the Games would cost nearly 9 billion euros or $9.8 billion, compared to an initial estimate of 6.9 billion euros in the bidding phase.
Judicial investigations in France can take years and it was not yet clear whether the two investigations announced on Tuesday would end with indictments.
But Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games Organizing Committee, had stressed that he wanted the organization’s conduct to be spotless.
“There is a shared determination to make these Games an exemplary project in every respect: in terms of budgetary rigor, transparency and the environment,” he told Le Parisien in 2017, the year Paris won its bid to host the Games .
Olympic Games organizers in other countries have faced similar investigations in the past, with the integrity of the process repeatedly questioned.
In February, Japanese prosecutors charged Dentsu, a Japanese advertising giant, and other companies with conspiracy to circumvent the public bidding process ahead of the Games as part of a wide-ranging investigation into corruption surrounding the Tokyo Olympics.
In 2021, Carlos Arthur Nuzman, the former longtime head of Brazil’s Olympic Committee, was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison after a judge in Brazil ruled that Rio de Janeiro’s success in securing the 2016 Summer Games was based on a bribery scheme. The decision came four years after he was detained as part of a joint investigation into sports corruption by investigators in Brazil and France.
And in the late 1990s, a bribery scandal erupted around the trial in which Salt Lake City won the bid for the 2002 Winter Games, with a senior Olympic official acknowledging widespread corruption and two main organizers indicted on charges including conspiracy to commit bribery. Those organizers were eventually acquitted by a federal judge, but the five-year scandal has tarnished the Games.