Some of the 833 million euros donated to help rebuild the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris is being spent on administrative fees and the €5 million-a-year running costs of a public body. These observations are contained in a provisional report produced by France's audit body, the Cour des Comptes, a copy of which has been seen by Mediapart.
The report, which is still confidential as it is being sent to interested bodies for their comments, notes that some of the money pledged by private individuals, companies and local authorities to rebuild the iconic Paris structure is in fact being spent on the administrative running costs of foundations collecting the money. Some of the collected cash is also being used to pay the fees of architects for clearing up lead pollution from the site.
In addition, donations are being diverted to pay the €5 million a year running costs of the public body set up to oversee the restoration of the cathedral after the devastating fire that seriously damaged it in April 2019. They are even funding the rent that this organisation pays the state to use a public building.
According to the Cour des Comptes report, by the end of 2019 more than 330,000 individuals – many from abroad - and 6,000 companies had contributed to the huge fund-raising appeal to restore the building. In the end pledges totalling 824.8 million euros were raised. And this extraordinary sum did not even include the money promised by the city authorities in Paris and the départements or counties in the Paris region who will finance the refurbishment of the area around the cathedral. In comparison the appeal after the tsunami that hit Asia in December 2004 raised 328 million euros.
As of December 31st 2019 some 184.4 million euros of this 824.8 million had already been paid. The figures in the audit report show that individuals had pledged 35% of the total, companies 56% and local authorities 8%. Overall some 16% of donations came from abroad. On July 2nd 2020 the army general in charge of the public reconstruction project, Jean-Louis Georgelin, updated the donation figures, telling French MPs that the overall sum pledged had now increased to 833 million euros, of which 190.4 million had been received.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
This means that close to 640 million euros of the total donation amount fall under the category of “firm promises”, such as the donations pledged by the wealthy French businessmen Bernard Arnault, chair of the LVMH luxury goods group, and François Pinault, founder of luxury goods group Kering, who have promised 300 million euros in total. The cosmetics group L'Oréal has also promised 200 million euros. Though the Covid crisis has since raised some fears over how much money will eventually be received, Jean-Louis Georgelin and the directors of the new public body overseeing the project say they are confident these sums will be paid when needed.
However, these donations do have a knock-on cost for the state. In legislation that came into force in July 2019 MPs voted to allow donors to offset their contribution against tax by as much as 75% (which falls to 66% for donations over 1,000 euros). So the 65 million euros in donations received from individuals in 2019 could cost the French Treasury 48 million euros. And while Arnault and Pinault have said they will not take advantage of the tax breaks, that is not the case with other large donors. Yet the legislation passed by French MPs stipulated that a report in September would provide transparency on the use of tax breaks.
Though President Emmanuel Macron has already set the reopening date the cathedral as the spring of 2024, the cost of the reconstruction work is still unknown. Indeed, the state has only just decided what the new spire will look like. After a tussle between those who wanted an identical spire to the old one and those, such as President Macron, who wanted an “architectural statement”, the former, more consensual, option was chosen. Nonetheless, some observers are wondering: have there been too many donations?
Indeed, some fear that part of the donated amount will end up being used to fund things other than the reconstruction of Notre-Dame. To reassure donors, article 2 of the July 2019 law is very clear: “The fund collected under the national fundraising are exclusively to be used to finance the conservation and restoration work on the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral and its furnishings of which the state is owner, as well as for the initial and ongoing training of the professionals with the particular competences that will be required for these works.”
The word “exclusively” was only belatedly added during Parliamentary debates on the legislation, in a bid by the government to reassure MPs. But in its report the Cour des Comptes believes that the state is not respecting this law in a number of ways.
First of all, there is an issue over the collection of the donated money itself. The legislation designates five bodies that can receive the money: the Treasury, the public monuments organisation the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, the Fondation de France, the heritage body Fondation du Patrimoine and the Fondation Notre-Dame. Under agreements set up with the Ministry of Culture the three foundations are permitted to deduct some donated money to pay for running costs. But this practice is an infringement of the principle that the funding will be used exclusively to fund the restoration work, and breaches the undertaking the government made to the Conseil d'État, the executive's official legal advisor.
The Cour des Comptes also questions differences in these administrative expenses, in particular about how the foundations - who are authorised to collect the money without having had to tender for the role - can charge varying amounts. The Fondation Notre-Dame is taking 3% of total donations it handles to cover its costs, while the Fondation de France deducts up to 1.5%. The Fondation du Patrimoine, meanwhile, charges an administrative fee of up to 1.5% just for company donations over a million euros.
Donors funding a public body
France's Ministry of Culture is no longer handling the restoration project. President Macron decided to hand it instead to a specially-created public body which now employs 39 officials. The president of this body – which is known formally as the Établissement Public chargé de la Conservation et de la Restauration de la Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris (EPRNDP) - is General Jean-Louis Georgelin. The general, a Catholic, and known for his industrious nature and frank talking, made it clear he wanted considerable leeway in getting the project done, even the freedom to dispense with some of the normal rules.
The Conseil d'État, which was consulted in advance about the setting up of this body, was unhappy that all its powers were to be concentrated in the hands of the future president, contrary to common law. The Conseil strongly advised against allowing the body's president to nominate some members of its board of directors, its advisory committee and even its audit committee.
But, in an unusual move, the government refused to follow the Conseil d'État's advice when it issued its final decree on settng the body up. General Georgelin thus obtained near-total control of the new public body and the then culture minister Franck Riester, who had already lost overall control of the restoration project, had to step aside.
When he spoke to MPs on July 2nd 2020 General Georgelin gave details of the salary he is due to earn alongside his military pension. He is earmarked to earn 4,800 euros a month plus a variable amount of up to 25% more. This salary has still to be officially approved though it is nonetheless considerably lower than the sometimes vast salaries paid to some of the directors of state-run cultural operations.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Even so, the Cour des Comptes report highlights a problem in the way this public body is funded: the government has decided to finance its running costs via the donations given for the restoration of the cathedral. The audit body points out that respecting the July 2019 law should mean that the donations only pay for the building work and not the 5 million euro annual running costs of the EPRNDP. The state itself should pay those operating costs.
This point has been raised, too, by MPs. Speaking in early July to the Parliamentary committee on cultural affairs, Brigitte Kuster, an MP from the ruling La République en Marche and president of the Parliamentary task force on Notre-Dame, asked: “Might these funds finance the contracting authority, in other words the public establishment itself, its running and its salaries? A strict reading of article 2 [editor's note, of the new law] excludes this possibility. Incidentally, some large donors won't accept it.”
The government has also been creative with the way it has arranged the new body's running costs. Unusually it is charging it rent, even though General Georgelin's organisation is based in 236m2 of office space in the VIIth arrondissement or district of Paris, in an official building usually occupied by services controlled by the prime minister. Normally such bodies do not pay the state any rent. But in this case the EPRNDP is being charged 213,000 euros a year of the donation money, plus annual service charges of 50,000 euros. This practice might, the Cour des Comptes notes, “raise questions”.
While the overall restoration project is under the control of the new public body, the actual works themselves are the responsibility of state architects who specialise in historic monuments. These architects, who have a monopoly over restoration work on all listed public buildings, have a particular status. They are both state officials and self-employed professionals under private law, and are paid a percentage of the overall cost of the works according to a sliding scale fixed by official decree.
The state architect Philippe Villeneuve has been in charge of Notre-Dame projects since 2013, and he was overseeing the works that were taking place at the cathedral when it caught fire in 2019. They were part of a ten-year programme of work to restore the upper parts of the spire that had begun in 2016 at an overall cost of 56 million euros.
In its report the Cour des Comptes examined those earlier works and found shortcomings in the public tender process. Initially, just two of the seven different batches of work could be awarded. The bids that came in for the other five batches were well above the estimated cost, with one 228% more than the project manager had estimated. After a new tender process some 4.2 million euros worth of work was finally awarded, though some of this still cost well above the initial estimate. The tender process involving one section of work was unsuccessful again, though despite this it was not repeated. This bid concerned the monitoring and surveillance of the project work. Despite the sensitive nature of this work, no justification was given for abandoning this part of the tender process.
None of this raises any doubts over Philippe Villeneuve concerning the fire itself. But in its report the Cour des Comptes asks why, alongside the judicial investigation into the blaze, the Ministry of Culture did not order an administrative inquiry to determine any potential failings in the project, particularly in the way the works were carried out.
The audit body also signals another failing in the period before the fire. In January 2019 the regional authority for the ministry, the Direction régionale des Affaires culturelles (DRAC), failed to relaunch the tender process over fire safety in time. Yet this deadline had been known about since as early as 2014. As a result the existing safety contract, awarded to the company Elytis, had to be extended.
The current rebuilding work is still at the stage of securing the site. Back in July 2019 the cost of this aspect of the works was estimated at 85 million euros. General Georgelin's comments to MPs suggest that this cost has already risen to 165 million euros. This is because of the extra time needed for those works, which will take place from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021, at an additional cost of 32 million euros, the re-evaluation of some services (27 million euros) and also the need to deal with the lead contamination at the site caused by the fire (21 million euros).
On this final point the audit body's report also expresses irritation over the likely fees for Philippe Villeneuve. These fees have been the subject of negotiation with the project manager and relate to the overall costs of the work and its complexity. Philippe Villeneuve initially claimed the maximum fees for the work to consolidate and make the site safe, with an one-off increase of 60% because of the constraints imposed by the presence of the lead, the large number of different groups involved and the “objectives set by the president of the Republic”.
But Villeneuve's request was rejected by the Ministry of Culture. At the end of November 2019, after a meeting with the heritage department within the ministry, the architect's expected fees were limited to an increase of 30%. But that is not the end of the story, for ultimately his fees have been renegotiated with the EPRNDP . Its president, General Georgelin, told MPs that the architect is now to receive a flat-rate payment rather than a percentage of the overall cost. Though so far the general has not revealed what that figure is.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter