Eiffel Tower probe clears BAPS, finds ‘no explicit request’ from delegation to remove female staff

Days after allegations of female staff being removed from the Eiffel Tower during a BAPS visit were made, a probe into the incident has found that the delegation made “no explicit request” for the same.

Female staff at Eiffel Tower had, last month, alleged that they were excluded during a private visit by a BAPS delegation. (AFP)Female staff at the landmark had, last month, alleged that they were excluded during a private visit by a delegation of Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha. The staff went on strike, following which Eiffel Tower was shut for a day. The Hindu group had denied the charge.

The findings came after a probe by the General Inspectorate of the City of Paris (IGVP), and were reported by Le Parisien.

The IGVP probe into the incident found that there had been “no explicit request” by BAPS regarding removal of female staff, but women employees were sidelined owing to a message distorted through word of mouth communication.

“The initial request brought to the attention of SETE concerned the lack of physical contact between religious figures and women,” the investigation report said. However, on the day of the BAPS visit, security posts were assigned “that very morning” to men, including the posts of the agents in charge and at the exit of the elevators.

The report further states that employees at the reception and in charge of customer relations were asked to temporarily leave “during the ascent of part of the delegation to the North pillar.” A cleaning service provider's employee then had to wait for her break, and another employee was replaced in an elevator during the group's descent, eventually leading to the female staff being sidelined, according to the report, accessed by Le Parisien.

The City of Paris's Inspector General has atrributed this to “an internal process in which a requirement for no contact was progressively translated into the assignment of male staff to various positions, and then extended in its implementation to the point of dismissing or replacing female employees already in place.” “Through word of mouth, the message was distorted,” the probe found.

However, the communication failure resulted in significant repercussions, with the operating firm that runs Eiffel Tower confirming that its chief will step down by the end of the year.

The firm named Société d’Exploitation de la tour Eiffel (SETE) said that its director general Patrick Branco Ruivo will leave his post after an internal probe conducted revealed that "operational flaws and shortcomings" in organising the visit led to the removal of women staff, AFP reported.

SETE said in a statement that the failures resulted “in female staff being excluded from the visit that day, an unacceptable situation". Ruivo has served as the director general of SETE since the end of 2018.

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