An investigation was opened at the request of the Paris Court of Appeal after the filing of a complaint on suspicion of misappropriation concerning the ticketing of Roland-Garros and targeting the French Tennis Federation (FFT), the French Tennis Federation (FFT) said on Monday. national financial prosecutor’s office (PNF) requested by the AFP.
The PNF announced in mid-June that it had closed a complaint filed on March 16 by executives and former leaders of the FFT “for lack of infraction.” They accused the current president of the federation, Gilles Moretton, and two of his relatives, the treasurer Jean-Luc Barrière and his former chief of staff Hugues Cavallin, of having “organized the misappropriation of tickets for the Roland-Garonne tournament Garros to the detriment of the FFT.
After analysis, the PNF had estimated that the transfers of tickets, questioned by the complainants and the Anticor association in a report in March, had “occurred before the modification” of the FFT regulations governing the ticketing of the French lifting of the Grand Slam. In addition, the PNF argued, the tickets granted to the leagues “gave rise to coherent financial compensation for the benefit of the leagues concerned, without any embezzlement or personal profit on the part of the leaders”. The suspicions of corruption denounced had also been dismissed.
But the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Me Jean-Pierre Versini-Campinchi – who died on October 12 – challenged this decision on June 30 with the public prosecutor’s office, as permitted by the code of criminal procedure. He had notably listed on ten pages the points on which the PNF had carried out, according to him, a bad analysis, he explained to AFP.
The public prosecutor’s office granted the complainants’ request and asked the PNF in July to open a preliminary investigation. “We are calm, this investigation cannot lead to anything other than a dismissal,” Gilles Moretton’s lawyer, Me Alain Jakubowicz, responded to AFP.
“The dismissal of the PNF was unusually and exceptionally motivated,” he added, and it is “extremely rare that it is motivated with so many arguments to conclude that there is nothing criminal, like I always said.” “This case is a joke. Coming to claim that there would have been embezzlement is surreal,” said Mr. Jakubowicz. New counsel for the plaintiffs could not be reached.
