The president of the Paris Olympics organizing committee (Cojo), Tony Estanguet, justified the increase in the committee’s payroll on Wednesday, after being questioned on the subject by deputies.
“The amount of the payroll is today 584 million euros, which represents 13% of the committee’s budget, rather lower compared to the last organizing committee of the Games and many companies,” a- he said during a hearing before the Assembly’s Cultural Affairs Committee.
LR MP Maxime Minot and PS MP Claudia Rouaux, herself a member of the Cojo remuneration committee, questioned Tony Estanguet on the increase of more than 100 million in the payroll and “on a recent salary increase of 45,000 euros on a basic annual salary of 155,000 euros”.
“What is being asked of this team is to do what has never been done in this country. This was supervised by experts who validated a remuneration scale,” he continued, explaining that there were “highly sought-after skills”. The committee’s remuneration committee is “independent”, he added.
“We need to recruit people over a fairly short period and we need to keep them until delivery,” he said. He also highlighted that there were four new sports at the Paris Olympics, an opening ceremony in the city, inflation, and explained a recent salary increase “for reasons of equal pay”.
“Great vigilance” from the State
The increase in payroll is highlighted in the program Complément d’Enquête which will be broadcast Thursday evening on France 2, and viewed by AFP. The program also returns to the financial prosecutor’s investigations relating in particular to the framework of Tony Estanguet’s remuneration or to suspicions of favoritism during the award of contracts.
At his side, the interministerial delegate to the Olympic Games, Michel Cadot added on Wednesday that the Cojo board of directors had validated these remunerations. The latter also added that there was “great vigilance” from the State on the Cojo budget and assured that there was “no significant imbalance”.
A sign that times are tough to close the budget four months right before the Olympics, the Cojo recently approached the Ile-de-France region to ask if it could financially support the travel of 200,000 accredited people (athletes, officials, journalists…), i.e. a budget of just under 10 million euros. The budget of the organizing committee is 4.4 billion euros (IOC contribution, ticketing and sponsorship revenue).
