Threat of bad weather for the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Games. The office of the organizing committee – the Milano-Cortina 2026 Foundation – was the subject of a search on Tuesday May 21 carried out by the Italian financial police. At issue are suspicions of embezzlement in the awarding of certain partnership contracts.
According to several Italian media and the agency Associated Press, the Guardia di Finanza in Milan searched the headquarters of the organizing committee, where its agents carried out computer searches and seized documents. In particular, they were looking for data on partnership contracts signed at the time when the position of general director of Milan-Cortina 2026 was occupied by Vincenzo Novari (photo above), who left in 2022.
«Ongoing audits focus on procedures used for selecting technology providers and sponsors, as well as the foundation's hiring of employees, Milan prosecutors said in a press release. No current officers or employees of the foundation are under investigation. »
According to the same sources, the Italian financial police also carried out searches in the offices of a private company, based in Orvieto, which had obtained a contract to develop digital services for the Winter Games in 2026. The police reportedly also visited an office of the Deloitte agency, now in charge of pursuing this contract with the organizing committee for the next Winter Games.
The operation carried out on Tuesday May 21 is part of an investigation carried out by the Milan public prosecutor's office into suspicions of corruption and tender rigging. It mainly concerns the award of the important market for digital services and IT security of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation. The facts would concern a period of one year, between March 2020 and March 2021.
Their names have not been cited by Italian justice, but three people are said to be in the sights of investigators. At the top of the list, Vincenzo Novari, the former general director of the organizing committee.
Another former executive of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation has also been indicted. Finally, the investigation concerns a third man, the former legal representative of the company Quibyt (formerly Vetrya), chosen by the organizing committee for the development of digital services.
Clarification: none of the three suspects is currently linked to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation. Vincenzo Novari left his position as general director in 2022. After a long period of uncertainty on the organizing committee, he was finally replaced in November 2022 by Andrea Varnier, still at the helm of the ship less than two years before the event.
At this stage of the affair, the organizing committee does not seem directly threatened. The investigation concerns two former employees and an executive of a company which is no longer linked to the Winter Games. And searches are nothing new in the Olympic world. The Paris 2024 COJO has seen its share. To date, they have given nothing.
However, the suspicions of embezzlement surrounding the 2026 Winter Games are reminiscent, both in substance and form, of the episode of corruption at the Tokyo 2020 Games. In either case, justice has its nose in the files, only to finally discover that the Games markets had sometimes been rigged.
With less than two years to go, the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Games did not need such publicity. Behind on their progress, at odds with the IOC on the matter of the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton track, they can no longer afford the slightest wrong step.
