“The Games must fund the Games. There will be no OJ tax.” This slogan from the President of the Republic, in July 2022, is on everyone’s minds. This was to indicate that public funds are not intended to fill a possible deficit in the budget of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop) of Paris 2024.
“Increased financial involvement of public authorities” in the budget of the structure responsible for planning, organizing, financing and delivering the Paris 2024 Games was, however, recorded in December 2022, as recalled in the budget documents published in the annex to the draft finance law for 2024. As far as the State is concerned, this “additional effort” will find its translation at the end of this year thanks to the amending finance bill for 2023.
Parliament will thus be asked to approve a “complementary subsidy” of 44.5 million euros, which will bring the State’s participation in financing the Games Organizing Committee to 124.5 million euros. compared to 80 million euros initially planned – of which 50 million have already been financed in 2022 and 2023 and 30 million are planned for 2024.
New contributions also from local authorities
This additional financial “boost” was decided at the end of a review of the revenue and expenditure forecasts for Paris 2024, carried out in 2022. It is notably through this means – in addition to various savings measures and upward revision of certain commercial revenues – that a display of a non-deficit Cojop budget had been obtained despite an upward revision of 400 million euros, to reach 4.38 billion euros.
To ensure this balance, the State is not the only one to have decided to increase its financial contribution. All public funding for Cojop will increase from 100 million to 171 million euros, with local authorities also having to contribute: funding from the City of Paris and the Île-de-France region will each increase from 10 million to 15.6 million euros.
Furthermore, the Métropole du Grand Paris, absent from the initial financing plan, has also committed to supporting Cojop to the tune of 15 million euros. All of this €71 million in new public funding was officially presented as meeting “the operating needs of the Paralympic Games”.
At the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, we today say we are “very confident” about Cojop’s compliance with its budget, and we see “no reason to be particularly alarmed” and to anticipate a potential further increase in spending by summer 2024.
In a report submitted to Parliament in July, the Court of Auditors had, for its part, highlighted the “strong uncertainties” still weighing on the realization of this budget. She had notably called on the management of Paris 2024 to “precisely monitor the achievement of the selected savings and ensure their effectiveness” because, she warned, there is now no longer any “substantial room for maneuver” possible.
