It was the most lucrative contract in Sodexo's Russian branch. The most "confidential" too, according to Igor (first name changed at his request), a former employee of the French multinational specializing in corporate catering and logistics. According to several internal documents obtained by Le Monde, Sodexo was in charge of catering and infrastructure (electrical generators such as the water treatment plant) on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline site.

Built between early 2018 and September 2021 − the official launch date of this controversial project linking Russia to Germany and crossing the Baltic Sea − it was then buried in the seabed in September 2022 after several of its pipelines were sabotaged in a mysterious clandestine operation.

The company has never publicly announced this multi-million-dollar contract. It is now the official partner of the Olympic Village for this summer's Games in Paris (from which Russian athletes are excluded). At the time that Sodexo was working on the site of the Russian gas giant's base camp near the town of Kingissep, 30 kilometers from the Estonian border, nothing, not even a logo, indicated that Sodexo was working on site.

After the tender won in 2017, several of the subsidiary's employees recount how the company allegedly tried to camouflage its involvement in this strategic Russian infrastructure for public image reasons. "Even if the operation was legal, we didn't want to be accused of collaborating with a state under sanctions," explained Igor, by phone.

Since the annexation of Crimea and part of eastern Ukraine in 2014, the European Union has been punishing certain Russian energy companies, including the oil division of Gazprom, the main shareholder in Nord Stream. Igor said that instead of collaborating with the Nord Stream AG consortium in charge of the pipeline, Sodexo approached STEP, one of their regular Russian subcontractors. STEP, headed by businessman Yuri Ioffe, also works with several companies in the group owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin (1961-2023), founder of the private military company Wagner and also of Concord Catering, which specializes in corporate catering. Le Monde contacted Yuri Ioffe several times but he did not respond to our questions.

Thanks to this sleight of hand, Sodexo made its work on the pipeline site virtually undetectable. A feat that was totally legal, even when the US imposed a series of sanctions against the pipeline in December 2019, said several former employees, who referred to meetings with their legal department on the issue. Sodexo continued its work in Russia until the project was completed. Through its communications department, which confirmed the work carried out on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline site, the company presented itself as STEP's "client" and claimed to have ensured that it was not in breach of "current sanctions programs."

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