Financial investigators broke into the Elysee Palace in the morning. They are looking for how a single agency won lucrative multimillion-euro government contracts for years.
Members of the financial and anti-corruption brigade (BFAC) of the judicial police intervened in the Elysee Palace in Paris on Tuesday. Their crackdown is linked to an investigation into an events agency that repeatedly won contracts for prestigious state memorial services. Referring to a source familiar with the case, the AFP reported about it.
French satirical and investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné reported that the police raid on the residence of the French presidents on rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré in central Paris took place in the early hours of the morning.
Investigation of Shortcut Events contracts
According to the weekly, investigators are looking into why Shortcut Events was repeatedly chosen for more than two decades to organize the burial ceremonies for important figures in French history at Paris’s Pantheon mausoleum.
Members of the French resistance from the period of the Second World War were among the personalities for whom the company provided funeral services. Each burial of the remains cost the state approximately two million euros, the weekly reports in its latest edition. The Elysée Palace has not yet responded to a request for a reaction, Le Parisien wrote.
However, the newspaper reported that the employees voluntarily handed over their computers to investigators, in accordance with the requests of the investigating judge.
Shortcut Events was founded in 1996. It currently employs approximately 30 people. In addition to organizing commemorative events, she also participated in the opening of the Cité de la Francophonie in Villers-Cotterêts in 2023 and the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings on Omaha Beach in June 2024. She also organized events to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2001 law that recognized slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. In France it is known as Taubira’s law.
