BOC chief held over bribes paid for Rio votes
rio de janeiro — The International Olympic Committee just can’t get away from the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
The IOC is ready to put a rubber-stamp approval this month on bids from Paris and Los Angeles for the 2024 and 2028 Olympics, respectively, yet Olympic officials are once again answering questions about corruption in the bidding process, this time from 2009, when Rio surprisingly got more votes than Madrid, Chicago and Tokyo.
The 2016 Rio Games were already marred by trails of corruption, and billions of public money spent and several useless whiteelephant venues spread around the city. Things got worse on Tuesday when police raided the home of Brazilian Olympic Committee President Carlos Nuzman, questioning him over his role in what French and Brazilian authorities say was a vote-buying scheme to land the Olympics.
Police took suitcases, documents and a computer, and they displayed detention warrants to question Nuzman.
“The Olympic Games were used as a big trampoline for acts of corruption,” federal prosecutor Fabiana Schneider told reporters.
The IOC will meet next week in Lima, Peru, and is expected to award two Summer Olympics at once. The bid process was changed in part to reduce the opportunity for fraud. The IOC won’t have to worry about another Summer Games bid until 2025, when it
The Olympic Games were used as a big trampoline for acts of corruption Fabiana Schneider
would award the 2032 Games.
“Although the IOC has tightened rules and looked to rid itself of the mavericks and the crooks in its midst, it is hardly a surprise that a top-level organiser of the Rio 2016 Games is suspected of buying votes,” Alan Tomlinson, an Olympic historian at the University of Brighton, told The Associated Press.
Tomlinson said world-wide sports federations “remain an uncontrollable behemoth in global sports governance.”
Investigators said Nuzman — an IOC member at the time, head of the organising committee, and now an honorary member — was a central player in buying votes for Rio’s Olympic bid.
Nuzman’s lawyer, Sergio Mazzillo, said his client would cooperate but “did not commit any irregularity.”
French and Brazilian authorities said Nuzman brought together businessman Arthur Cesar de Menezes Soares Filho, and Lamine Diack, the former head of track and field’s governing body who at the time was an IOC voting member. Soares Filho’s company, Matlock Capital Group, allegedly paid Diack $2 million into a Caribbean account held by his son, Papa Massata Diack. —