The impact of inflation on the budget of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop) is still being quantified. But to avoid a slippage, which the organizers officially say they want to avoid at all costs, one of the levers will consist in mobilizing part of the contingency reserve. This was declared on Wednesday, October 12, by the Minister of Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Amélie Ouda-Castéra.
Faced with the additional costs generated by the rise in prices (approximately 6%), a “capital issue”, “there is no magic wand”she explained before the Senate Cultural Affairs Committee. Since the Cojop budget was established on the basis of inflation at 1.4%, it will be necessary “review a number of arbitrations” in terms of expenses, and also sometimes compensate in terms of revenue [dégager des recettes supplémentaires] to maintain the balance between expenditure and revenue, detailed the Minister. She added that a “third adjustment item” would consist of “a mobilization of part of the contingency reserve”.
An audit committee invited to “preserve the contingency reserve”
This contingency reserve, which appears in the Cojop budget (3.9 billion euros), is 315 million euros. It has not been requested so far. Until recently, the management of Paris 2024 claimed to refuse to touch it. Nor does it plan to resort to the State guarantee, increased from 1.2 billion to 3 billion euros, at the end of 2021, for “to cover any possible deficit of the multiannual budget of the Cojop”, according to article 39 of the finance bill for 2022.
In July, an audit committee, set up at the request of the management of Cojop, and headed by the former prefect Jacques Lambert, for its part recommended “that everything be done to preserve the contingency reserve of the budget at the highest possible level”.
In its report, this committee had instead recommended “to give up any operations scheduled and not yet started”. He underlined in particular that the essence of the problems does not lie in a ” lack of cost control, but difficulty in matching the service level requirements required by the International Olympic Committee on the one hand, the ambitions devolved to certain projects on the other hand, with the financial resources available”.