The only thing more consistent than the Olympic Games, is the possible corruption that runs rampant in trying to find which city will host the games. Every so often, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) meets to map out the location for future games. And nearly every time this happens, someone is doing some alleged bribing to get their city to the top of the list.
The 2024 Summer Olympic games are set to be held in Paris, and right on schedule, police have raided the Paris offices on suspicion of corruption.
On the morning of June 20th, reports were confirmed by the Paris 2024 Olympic Committee that police investigations were in process in “several locations.” The committee also stated they were fully cooperating with investigators and their collecting of documents.
Currently, the investigation is centered around potential conflicts of interest and favoritism regarding how the contract was formed between the IOC and Paris 2024 Olympic Committee. Reports indicate these current raids could be tied to other investigations that took place in 2017 and 2022, that also concerned potential corruption and bribery. As the raids were just launched though, this is quite obviously a breaking story with more information presumably on the way as the investigators eventually discuss their findings.
As alluded to in the opening paragraph, this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened. As recently as the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 a number of Japanese companies were indicted for bid-rigging and bribery to where French prosecutors started an investigation in 2019 regarding it. Even the head of Japan’s Olympic Committee stepped down after the investigations began. Step back a couple decades before that to the 2000 Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah and you’ll find another bribery scandal that is easy to forget now, but was devastating news at the time to the entire IOC.
So yeah, maybe there was no bribery and the French investigators won’t find any evidence of corruption. Or maybe history repeats and some things never change.
