The Paris 2024 Olympic Games had to be “exemplary” from an ethical and also environmental point of view. That ambitious promise made by the organizers yesterday suffered a serious setback. Both the headquarters of the organizing committee (Cojo) and the offices of others linked to the sporting event were the subject of judicial searches as part of an investigation into alleged influence peddling, favoritism and embezzlement of public funds.
The Olympic event will arrive exactly 401 days from now – on July 26 of next year – and is destined to be the showcase of a modern and booming France, with Paris as the main European investment magnet after Brexit dealt a hard blow to London. For Emmanuel Macron, it may be the last great chance to bring brilliance to a presidency rich in turbulence and declining.
Suspicions of corruption undermine the French narrative. The searches actually came as a relative surprise because there were two ongoing investigations, the first opened in 2017 and the second in 2022. In addition to Cojo, which is based in Saint-Denis in the northern Parisian suburbs, it also investigates Solideo, the company in charge of building, setting up and delivering the Olympic facilities. Potentially irregular practices were discovered in procurement and service contracts, so the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office was activated. According to the AFP agency, one of those involved in a possible conflict of interest would be Édouard Donnelly, executive director of operations of El Cojo. In the inspections carried out by the French Anti-corruption Agency, it was detected that the general procedure for purchases was “imprecise and incomplete”, with the risk of creating situations of conflict of interests that would tarnish the image that is intended to be given of the Games.
Shadows of corruption are not the only judicial problem facing the organizers of the Games. Another front is labor exploitation. Also yesterday, the news of the complaint filed by ten foreign workers without proper papers broke. These people are demanding that the companies that employed them in the construction of the Olympic village, including industry giants such as Vinci, Eiffage, Spie, Batignolles and GCC, pay them compensation for holidays and overtime they did not receive, since they had no legal contracts. These are mainly people of African origin.
The use of illegal labor is a common practice in France, with particular incidence in construction and restoration. Without it, these sectors would be semi-paralyzed due to lack of staff. That is why the Government has proposed legalizing foreign employees without papers, an initiative blocked by the right for political and electoral reasons. However, to know that even in the Olympic works the legality is violated, as the unions periodically denounce, damages the prestige of France, whose human rights organizations were very thinned out with the same problem before the soccer World Cup in Qatar.
