Paris 2024 Olympic Games: Games more expensive than expected… discover the estimate from the President of the Court of Auditors Pierre Moscovici

Pierre Moscovici “ne connait pas encore le coût des JO”. MAXPPP – Alexis Sciard

According to Pierre Moscovici, the first president of the Court of Auditors, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games "should cost between three and five billion euros of public money.

The Paris Olympic Games "should cost" between three and five billion euros’ public money, said Tuesday the first president of the Court of Auditors, Pierre Moscovici, on France Inter.

"We do not yet know the cost of the Olympics", said Mr. Moscovici, "the Court of Auditors will audit it after the Olympics". "These Games should cost between 3, 4, 5 billion, we'll see but that's not what will have an absolutely massive impact" on the debt, he clarified.

To a listener's question about the impact of the 2024 Olympics on the debt, Mr. Moscovici replied that it would be "moderate". Until now, Pierre Moscovici mentioned the figure of 3 billion euros of public money for the Olympics. In 2023, the budgetary documents reported public investments of 2.44 billion euros (including 1.3 billion for the State or 260 million for the city of Paris).

Some costs still unknown

But, overall, the public bill is not possible because all the costs are not known. Recently, for example, bonuses of 1,900 euros given to police officers were added, which could increase the public bill by 500,000,000 euros. Currently, the provisional bill for the Olympics, public and private money mixed, is around 9 billion euros.

The Olympic organizing committee (Cojo) has a budget of 4.4 billion euros made up of 96% private money, of which Added to this is the budget of Solideo, responsible for building the permanent structures, also around 4.4 billion euros, including 1.7 billion in public money.< /p>

A sign that times are tough to complete the budget four months right before the Olympics, the Cojo recently contacted the Ile-de-France region to ask if it could financially cover the travel of 200& ;nbsp;000 accredited (athletes, officials, journalists…), i.e. a budget of just under 10 million euros.

The Cojo can "optimize as much as possible" its recipes, having " still sponsors to go to work" and "places for sale", estimated Valérie Pécresse , interviewed on this subject Tuesday by the AFP.