An investigation was opened after a report from the Court of Accounts pointing to financial slippages and suspicions of favoritism regarding the Pharaonic site of the super-metro Grand Paris Express, AFP learned Wednesday close source file. This preliminary investigation was launched by the National Public Prosecutor's Office (PNF), said this source confirming without more details an information of the weekly Marianne .

"Bypassed" procedures. In a report made public on January 17, 2018, the Court of Accounts had drawn up a severe diagnosis on the finances of the Société du Grand Paris (SGP), the public institution primarily responsible for building the future automatic metro around the capital. . Encrypted at 19 billion euros during the public debate in 2010, the supermétro of some 200 km was already valued at 22.63 billion when the project was refined in 2013. In the end, the total cost of the Grand Paris Express would be 38 , 48 billion euros, including the "financial contributions" of the SGP to other projects in the Paris region, according to the Court of Auditors. "The projected costs (...) have drifted steadily", summed up at the time in this report gendarmes of public funds, also highlighting that "rules of procedure" have "sometimes (been) bypassed" in the award of significant contracts. "At times, the Court has identified markets for which the procedures and the main principles of competition had not been respected," reads the report.

Anticor had given the alert. The anti-corruption association Anticor had appealed to the court on June 12, 2018, which had not responded to its request to open an investigation, pending "possible additional elements" and a report from the Court of Justice. accounts, according to the extracts of a letter of the parquet national financial (PNF) published on the site of Anticor. Anticor subsequently wrote to the Court of Auditors on 15 November 2018 asking him to forward a report to the PNF. "We are very pleased that this investigation is opened on this extraordinary case which concerns a total budget of more than 38 billion euros of which 13 billion slippages and with 164 public contracts passed without any competition", reacted the president of Anticor, Jean-Christophe Picard.