PARIS, Jan 22, 2010 (AFP) – The bank that sponsors and lends its name to the Caisse d’Epargne cycling team, which has Spaniard Alejandro Valverde on its books, will pull its funding at the end of 2010.

“There will be a Caisse d’Epargne team on the 2010 Tour de France but it’s a contract that stops in 2010. It will not be renewed,” Francois Perol, president of banking group Banque Populaire-Caisses d’Epargne (BPCE), told Radio-Classique.

“We became the French banking sponsor of the Olympic Games so we will accompany the French national teams to Vancouver, to London in 2012 and we will support Annecy’s candicacy for the Winter Olympics in 2018,” Perol said.

“It’s a business management decision and because the values of the Olympics seem to correspond closely to the values of BPCE.”

Caisse d’Epargne has sponsored the Spanish cycling team run first by Jose Miguel Echavarri and latterly Eusebio Unzue since 2005.

Apart from Valverde, who is serving a two-year suspension in Italy for alleged links to the notorious Operation Puerto doping scandal, the team also figures Spain’s Paris-Nice winner Luis Leon Sanchez, Colombian climbers Mauricio Soler and Rigoberto Uran, and up-and-coming Portuguese rider Rui Da Costa.