Paris 2024, police searches at the headquarters of the organizing committee

14 months after the opening ceremony of the Games, the French financial police are searching the headquarters of the Paris 2024 organizing committee in Saint Denis. As reported by Rmc, the agents are examining and seizing documents. According to what is learned, they could remain in the headquarters of the organizing committee all day. And in the viewfinder there are also other sites related to the Games.

The committee “cooperates fully with the investigators to facilitate their investigations”, reads a statement. The searches are carried out by the Central Office for the fight against corruption and financial and tax crimes and by the financial brigade of the Parisian judicial police.

The two reports

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No ongoing investigations into the committee had so far been made official, but in April 2021 two reports from the French anti-corruption agency on the organization of the Olympic Games indicated “risks of violation of fairness” and “conflicts of interest”, a scratch on the image of the ‘exemplary’ Olympics wanted by the head of the organizing committee Tony Estanguet. These first two reports delivered at the beginning of 2021 concern the Organizing Committee itself (Cojo) and Solideo, the company that must deliver the works for the Games. The AFA inspectors considered that the general procedure relating to purchases is “imprecise and incomplete”, and underlined that there are “sometimes situations of potential conflict of interest that are not controlled”.

The complaint

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According to France Info, behind the searches there would be the complaint presented by ten workers who were allegedly employed on construction sites for the works under construction and who have called into question, before the Labor Court of Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis), four construction companies and eight related subcontracting companies.