Diack jailed after being found guilty of corruption

Lamine Diack, the former head of world athletics, has been sentenced to four years in prison, two of them suspended, by a French court for his part in a corruption scandal.

A statement from the French ministry of justice confirmed the sentence for the 87-year- old from Senegal, who had been charged with directly or indirectly soliciting €3.45 million (£3.15m) in bribes from athletes, many of them Russian, to cover up positive drug tests.

It was reported that presiding judge Rose -Marie Hun au lt told Diack that due to his age it was not expected he would serve a custodial sentence, but instead be granted conditional release.

In addition to the prison sentence, Diack was fined €500,000 (over £450,000). He served as the head of athletics’ global federation, known at the time as the IA AF, b et ween 1999 and 2015. He had been under house arrest in France since November 2015.

Allegation sofa conspiracy to cover up positive drugs tests in Russia first came to light when Yuliya Step a nova and he rh usband spoke out in March 2013. Eleven months later Andrei Baranov, the agent of Russian marathon runner Lilya Shobukhova, told the race director of world athletics’ governing body, then known as the IAAF, she had been asked to pay €450,000 over a two-year period to stay off a doping watch list in order to compete at the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

In January 2016 the World Anti-doping Agency found Diack “organised and enabled” the Russian doping scandal within the IAAF. The IAAF issued life bans from the sport to his son Papa Massata Diack, the former president of the Russian athletics federation Valentin Balakhnichev and the former head of its long- distance running programme Alexei Melnikov.

Diack Jr was sentenced to five years in prison but remains in Senegal, with the authorities in the West African country having refused to extradite him to France.