The General Inspectorate of the City of Paris has cleared the Hindu organization BAPS of the most damaging allegation in the Eiffel Tower controversy: its investigators found no evidence that the BAPS delegation explicitly asked for female staff to be removed from the tower during its September 5 visit. The report instead blames a "collective dysfunction" — a chain of errors in how the visit was assessed, approved and carried out.
The report's central finding is that there is no written document or email from BAPS explicitly asking for female employees to be sidelined. "There's not a single written document... expressing this opinion. Everything was done between consenting adults," the investigation states, according to the Hindustan Times. The probe draws a sharp distinction between what the delegation allegedly requested or discussed and how Eiffel Tower personnel ultimately implemented the arrangements — the former unproven, the latter undeniable: female staff were in fact asked to leave their posts that day.
The inspectorate concluded the incident resulted from a cascade of failures: how the visit request was evaluated, how the special arrangements were approved, and how they were executed on the ground each went wrong, compounding into the sidelining of women. The report does not find that Patrick Branco Ruivo, director general of the tower's operating company SETE, personally ordered female employees removed. SETE had previously acknowledged that the delegation asked for arrangements limiting "interactions with women" and said those conditions "should not have been accepted."
The revelations triggered a staff strike that closed the 1,083-foot landmark — which draws some 7 million visitors a year — for a day on September 7. On September 29, SETE announced that Ruivo, in the job since late 2018, would step down at the end of 2026 after an independent investigation uncovered "a series of operational failures." The outcry reached France's political class: National Assembly president Yaël Braun-Pivet and Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire condemned the treatment of the women, and City Hall ordered two independent investigations, of which this report is one.
BAPS has maintained that the visit was scheduled at the start of opening hours purely for logistical reasons given the size of its roughly 100-person delegation, which was in Paris for the inauguration of a traditional Hindu stone temple near the city. "To the best of our knowledge, at no point was anyone prevented from accessing the Eiffel Tower," the organization said, while apologizing for any distress caused. With the "explicit request" allegation now rebutted by investigators, the focus shifts inside SETE: who translated a vague request to limit contact into the removal of women, and who signed off at each step. SETE chair Ariel Weil has ordered gender-equality training measures.