The investigations carried out by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) targeting the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop) of Paris 2024 did not reveal, “at this stage, there are elements that could lead to extremely serious acts of corruption or influence peddling”declared thehe national financial prosecutor, Jean-François Bohnert, Wednesday September 13 from the microphone of RTL.
“The themes we work on are mainly formal offenses, questions of favoritism, illegal taking of interest. It is the way in which certain contracts were distributed, arrangements, it is the functioning of each other that we are in the process of unraveling”he explained.
Searches were carried out in June at the headquarters of Cojop and the public establishment responsible for infrastructure, the Olympic Works Delivery Company (Solideo), as well as at the homes of two Cojop executives in two preliminary investigations carried out by the PNF.
The most recent was opened in 2022 on possible irregularities and conflicts of interest linked to public contracts following the publication of provisional reports from the French Anti-Corruption Agency and the reporting of a Parisian elected official to the courts.
But this is a first criminal procedure, launched in 2017 on suspicion of “illegal taking of interest, favoritism and misappropriation of public funds”, which experienced an acceleration before the summer.
No police guards during the Games
This targets several contracts awarded by the bid committee (GIP 2024) and Cojop, as well as the conflicts of interest arising from the departures from their former company co-founded in 2008, Keneo, towards Paris 2024, of Etienne Thobois, current general director of Cojop, and Edouard Donnelly, executive director of Games operations.
Mr. Bohnert assured that these investigations would not lead to police custody during the Games. “Our goal is to enable a peaceful process (…) of a universal celebration. It is not up to us to disrupt this event. This is why we worked upstream”he explained, recalling that this is why the searches “came more than a year before the start of the Games”. “This is a sign that we are taking things very seriously in substance, but also respecting this great event. »