regional audit of Morzine has laid bare years of irregular contracts

A regional audit of Morzine has laid bare years of irregular contracts, blurred conflicts of interest and a ski-lift deal weighted heavily in favour of a private operator — reopening questions about how France's mountain resorts really run their business

Morzine has spent decades selling itself as one of the more understated jewels of the Portes du Soleil, a working village-turned-resort of fewer than 3,000 permanent residents that punches well above its weight thanks to its ski-lift links to Avoriaz next door. That image of quiet competence has taken a hit. A regional audit office has spent months combing through the accounts of the town hall and its tourist board, and what it found was not simple bookkeeping sloppiness — it was a pattern of contracts awarded outside the rules, financial arrangements that favoured private companies over the municipality, and safeguards against conflicts of interest that were, in the auditors' words, barely enforced.

What the auditors found

The Chambre régionale des comptes (CRC) Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the regional financial court responsible for scrutinising local public spending, examined Morzine's municipal accounts covering 2019 onward, alongside a separate review of the Morzine-Avoriaz tourist office's finances for 2019 to 2024. Three mayors passed through the town hall over that period — Gérard Berger, then Nicolas Trombert from May 2020, then Jean-François Berger from March 2024, following a wave of resignations from the municipal council that forced fresh elections.

The findings, made public in November, describe governance "tainted by numerous irregularities." Public procurement is flagged as a particular weak point: contracts were reportedly notified to bidders without ever passing through the required competitive-tendering commission, and the commune's overall approach to public contracts was judged inadequately secured against risk. A delegated public service arrangement for children's holiday clubs was found to have been run irregularly and effectively concealed from the prefecture, because required paperwork was never submitted.

The tourist office fared little better. Its governing statutes, unchanged since 1999, are too vague about what powers its president actually holds and how those powers should be accounted for, according to the auditors. More pointed still, the office's rulebook was found to blend the general public interest it is meant to serve with the private interests of its own staff, elected officials and outside organisations — precisely the blurring that conflict-of-interest safeguards are supposed to prevent. A partnership contract between the tourist office and a private car company was singled out as containing numerous irregularities, both in how it was written and how it was carried out.

Ski lifts, dividends and a lopsided deal

The sharpest criticism concerns how Morzine and Avoriaz manage their ski slopes — arguably the single most valuable asset either resort controls. Both are run under separate délégations de service public (DSPs), the concession-style contracts through which French municipalities hand operation of public services to private companies. Auditors described both as poorly overseen and skewed against the town's financial interests.

At Avoriaz, the imbalance is stark: the private company operating the ski domain is said to have paid out €22.4 million in dividends to its shareholders while returning just €4.3 million to the town that owns the underlying public asset. In Morzine, the 2024 renewal of the ski-lift concession — negotiated jointly with the neighbouring communes of Les Gets and Verchaix — ran into trouble when the town entered negotiations with the only company left in the running, an offer auditors say should have been declared invalid. That bidder later withdrew, triggering a second bidding round that the CRC says carried a high risk of conflicts of interest. The contract that eventually emerged, the report concludes, still works to the commune's disadvantage.

Elsewhere, the audit catalogues smaller-scale irregularities that nonetheless point to weak internal controls: employees recorded as absent from duty while simultaneously being paid an on-call allowance, staff housing rented out without the value of that benefit being properly declared, free ski passes handed to municipal agents, and unexplained overtime payments. Travel and hospitality expenses were also found to lack transparency. The CRC has called for tighter oversight of working hours and issued fifteen recommendations aimed at improving transparency and control over the delegated contracts going forward.

A resort's finances, if not its governance, in good shape

Notably, the audit does not describe a town in financial distress. Morzine's budget position is characterised as sound, helped by an increase in the tax levied on second homes — a significant revenue stream in a resort where a large share of the housing stock sits empty outside the ski season. That distinction matters: this is not, on the evidence made public so far, a story of a town going broke. It is a story about how public money and public assets were governed and to whom their benefits ultimately flowed.

A pattern beyond one commune

Regional financial courts issue this kind of report fairly regularly, and mountain resorts are no strangers to their scrutiny — ski-lift concessions are lucrative, long-lived contracts, often running for decades, and the sums involved can dwarf a small commune's annual budget. What sets the Morzine findings apart is the range of issues raised across two connected institutions, the town hall and its tourist office, spanning procurement, governance, staff benefits and, most consequentially, the contracts governing the resort's core commercial engine: its lifts.

The report itself is an administrative finding, not a criminal one — the CRC's role is to assess the legality and efficiency of public spending, and its conclusions are not the same as a judicial finding of corruption. But irregularities of the kind identified — undeclared conflicts of interest, contracts notified outside competitive process, deals judged unfavourable to the public body that signed them — are also the building blocks prosecutors look for when public procurement offences, such as favouritism or corruption, are formally investigated elsewhere in France. Whether Morzine's findings prompt any such follow-up is, for now, an open question. What is already clear is that a resort built on its reputation for quiet reliability now has to answer for how it spent, delegated and safeguarded the public's money.