Judicial police searched the Halle Spada, one of two workshops behind Nice's world-famous carnival, on Wednesday, July 22, as part of a fraud investigation into how the city awards contracts to build its parade floats, according to France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
Nice's public prosecutor, Damien Martinelli, confirmed the search was carried out jointly by the interregional judicial police service and France's competition and consumer fraud authority, the DGCCRF, as part of a preliminary investigation opened in spring 2024. Investigators are examining whether the four historic families of carnavaliers, who have long built the carnival's floats and giant heads, may have coordinated to bypass competition rules when bidding for contracts, which the carnival's roughly 7 million euro annual budget can make worth between 50,000 and 100,000 euros per float, according to Cannes Tendances.
At the centre of the inquiry is the Halle Spada itself, a 15,000 square metre municipal building on avenue Denis Semeria made available to the four historic carnavalier families. Jean-Christophe Picard, a former city councillor who sat on the tender commission in 2022 and voted against the arrangement, said the free use of such a large space gave the historic families an advantage competitors never had. One of the carnavaliers, speaking to ICI Côte d'Azur, disputed that any of it broke the law. "We're responding to a call for tenders as a group, covering every lot, and there's nothing wrong with that," she said. "The law allows us to do this, so I don't see what the problem is."