2023-06-21 13:27:53
After searches on Tuesday at the respective headquarters of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop) and Solideo, the company responsible for building the Olympic sites, the sports consultancy company Keneo was, on Wednesday 21 June, the target of investigators from the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF).
The search of the premises of Keneo, in the center of Paris, began in the morning and ended in the early followingnoon, according to judicial sources, confirming information from Agence France-Presse (AFP) .
It is part of an investigation into contracts awarded for the Games, opened in 2017 by the PNF and entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight once morest Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses. Keneo’s governing bodies were not immediately available to react.
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This investigation relates to a series of contracts awarded by, among others, “the 2024 Olympic Games Organizing Committee and the 2024 GIP”, the bid committee, which preceded the Cojop, said the PNF on Tuesday. The offenses covered are: illegal taking of interests, embezzlement of public funds, favoritism and concealment of favouritism.
In an article from May 2017, four months before the designation of Paris as the host city of the Games, Mediapart had shown that Keneo had received 2 million euros in GIP 2024 contracts while there were potential conflicts of interest between the team responsible for preparing the French bid and the event agency.
At that time, the general manager of the Paris 2024 bid committee was (since July 2015) Etienne Thobois, who had previously been the boss of Keneo: in the summer of 2017, he assured that he had sold, in the spring of 2015, his shares in this company which he had co-founded. Mr. Thobois is now CEO of Paris 2024.
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It was Edouard Donnelly who succeeded, between 2015 and 2018, to Mr. Thobois as director of Keneo, which he had co-founded with the latter. After participating in the creation, at the end of 2020, of an agency specializing in the development of sporting events, named RNK, Mr. Donnelly became, in November 2022, executive director of operations of Cojop. RNK is part of a group of companies that won the contract to organize the Olympic torch relay.
At the end of 2022, the management of Cojop had assured that its ethics committee had found nothing wrong with possible conflicts of interest. Mr. Donnelly had been asked to sell his shares in RNK and not deal with markets for which his former companies might apply. According to AFP, the source familiar with the matter clarified that RNK was not targeted by either of the two ongoing investigations.
Our selection of articles on the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games
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