IAAF ‘opts’ against Qatar bribery probe
Diack advisor freed
PARIS, Oct 25, (AFP): Athletics’ world body has decided not to investigate bribery claims against Qatar after a preliminary probe failed to find anything more than “rumours” surrounding bidding for the 2017 world championships.
The IAAF was acting on testimony from UK Athletics chief Ed Warner that the world body’s then vice-president, and now president Sebastian Coe had told him Qatari delegates were handing out cashstuffed “brown envelopes” before members cast their votes in 2011.
But the body’s ethics board said Coe, when questioned, couldn’t remember hearing the rumour or making the comment, and that nobody present had corroborated Warner’s claim. “To date, none of the respondents have had any relevant evidence corroborative of Mr Warner’s recollection or relevant to the alleged factual matters the subject of the purported rumour,” a statement said.
London won the vote to host the 2017 world championships, while Qatar will hold the following edition in 2019 after coming out on top in a ballot in 2014.
Qatar was also embroiled in corruption allegations surrounding its successful bid to host the football World Cup in 2022.
A World Anti-Doping Agency report in January claimed that “corruption was embedded” in the IAAF, whose former president Lamine Diack has been charged with corruption, moneylaundering and conspiracy.
A French court has ordered the release from police custody of a former legal adviser to disgraced former world athletics head Lamine Diack, his lawyers said on Monday.
Habib Cisse was placed behind bars earlier this month as part of a French investigation into corruption linked to state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes.
Cisse, 41, was put under investigation in November 2015 for corruption along with Diack and Gabriel Dolle, former anti-doping doctor for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). “His provisional detention was completely unjustified,” his lawyers Louis-Marie de Roux and Cedric Labrousse told AFP after successfully appealing his incarceration, insisting he was not a flight risk.
Diack headed the IAAF from 1999 to 2015 but found himself at the centre of a maelstrom that blew track and field’s governing body apart. French police have charged Diack with corruption on suspicion the Senegalese accepted bribes to cover up doping cases in Russia. He was also charged with money laundering and conspiracy.
Cisse, a lawyer by profession, is suspected of playing a key role in the scandal. Eliane Houlette, head of France’s financial prosecution department, said in January that all three men had admitted covering up positive Russian drug tests.