A search is underway at the headquarters of the organizing committee (Cojo) of the Games-2024, in Saint-Denis, near Paris, the Cojo told AFP on Tuesday, without specifying what the investigation was about.
Fourteen months before the Olympics, no announcement of a judicial inquiry targeting the committee was known to date. The Cojo “cooperates fully with the investigators to facilitate their investigations”, added the committee. A source close to the investigation confirmed the search to AFP.
The searches are carried out by the OCLCIFF (Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offences) and the BRDE, the financial brigade of the Parisian judicial police, we learned from the same source. The Cojo is set up as an association under the 1901 law. The Court of Auditors closely monitors its activity and is due to publish a report very soon.
In April 2021, two reports from the French anti-corruption agency (AFA) on the organization of the Olympics, which AFP learned of, pointed to “risks of breaches of probity” and “conflicts of interest “Scratching the image of the” exemplary “Olympics wanted by the boss of the Organizing Committee Tony Estanguet.
These two initial reports delivered at the start of 2021, the content of which Le Canard Enchaîné had already mentioned almost a month ago, are devoted to the Organizing Committee (Cojo) itself and to Solideo, the company which 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 conflicts of interest not controlled”.
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