The day after the accusations of the prefect of Corsica, Amaury de Saint-Quentin, who warned of “serious failures” regarding the screening of baggage and passengers at Ajaccio airport, the island’s chamber of commerce and industry (CCI) assured, Wednesday April 24, that security “has never been degraded”.
The regional body is the manager of airports on the Isle of Beauty, and it awarded the company SAP SUR the public contract for this airport security. These “failures” revealed by the prefect on Tuesday come after three successive audit missions carried out by the services of the general directorate of civil aviation (DGAC). “During the last check carried out in January, no significant improvement was observed” in this matter, according to the prefect, who specifies that “more than half of the failures noted eighteen months earlier, including the most serious, had not been the subject of any concrete corrective action”.
“These findings do not guarantee users of Ajaccio airport the minimum level of security provided in all airports”he regretted, mentioning “the context of raising the Vigipirate plan to its highest level, “emergency attack”, March 25.”
In a press release on Wednesday, the CCI however considered that “the level of security and safety of airport users has never been degraded, only the flow and fluidity of passages at the inspection-screening stations are impaired as long as the available staff is insufficient in number.” “The main dysfunctions observed date back many years, sometimes decades”adds the CCI, ensuring that it has ” many “ elements for “demonstrate regular information to the authorities concerned”.
The CCI “placed under reinforced surveillance”
Asked by Agence France-Presse (AFP) about these dysfunctions, Jean Dominici, president of the CCI, responded “that the security of Ajaccio airport has always been a problem, which has lasted since the SMS”the Mediterranean Security Society, which had been at the center of a resounding trial in 2011. In connection with the CCIs of Corsica-du-Sud or Var, the SMS had thus won in a completely fraudulent manner (no competitive bidding). , complete opacity of the award conditions, etc.) several contracts linked to the security of Ajaccio airport, its port and Toulon-Hyères airport.
” The only [dysfonctionnement]there are expectations, but today safety is respected”, assured Mr. Dominici to AFP. The CCI of Corsica announces that it has undertaken “to internalize in the very short term” all inspection-screening missions at Ajaccio airport “in order to definitively resolve this period of operational fragility and financial uncertainty”.
However, Prefect Amaury de Saint-Quentin announced on Tuesday that “to urgently remedy these recurring failures”the CCI “was placed under reinforced surveillance by the DGAC on April 9, immediately allowing an increase in State resources [consacrés] monitoring the successful completion of security missions.
This public airport security contract, valued at 11 million euros, is at the heart of legal proceedings. On February 6, Dominique Peretti, the director of the company SAP SUR, was indicted for “organized gang extortion, criminal association and concealment of favoritism” by an investigating magistrate of the specialized interregional jurisdiction of Marseille.
The investigation began after the complaint, at the end of March 2023, from a manager of the company Samsic Airport, the only other bidder for the call for tenders, who declared having received a death threat call just before going to in Corsica. Samsic Airport then withdrew its file from the call for tenders.