Davies expelled from IAAF
LONDON (AP): IAAF PRESIDENT Sebastian Coe’s former right-hand man was expelled from athletics’ governing body yesterday after admitting to concealing cash payments during the scandalplagued previous administration. But Nick Davies was cleared of corruption and allowed to continue working in athletics and at IAAF events.
The senior IAAF official was found to have misled investigators from the World AntiDoping Agency, French judicial authorities and the IAAF over the €30,000 received ahead of the 2013 World Championships.
The payments from then-president Lamine Diack came via his son Papa Massata Diack, a former marketing consultant at the IAAF, who was last year banned for life from the sport in a bribery and extortion case involving Russian doping. Both father and son are being investigated by French prosecutors on corruption charges linked to cover-ups of Russian doping cases.
Davies served as communications director and deputy secretary general under Diack and, after Coe’s election in 2015, was promoted to director of the president’s office. The IAAF ethics panel accepted that Davies did not act corruptly and was not part of a cover-up of Russian doping cases but did criticise him for deceiving the probe.
Davies “only admitted to his lie” about the payments after being forced to hand over bank statements, the IAAF said.
Davies told ethics investigators €25,000 were provided by Diack as “extra funds which should be used at my discretion to improve the media mood” before and during World Championships in Moscow. Davies said he only spent a “fraction” of the cash because there was no major crisis at the event and kept the balance. Another envelope of €5,000 was described as a bonus from Diack to “recognise my attitude and good work”.
“We were accustomed to receiving cash at the IAAF ... I did not believe that there could be any sinister motives behind these payments,” Davies told investigators.
The ethics board said Davies can still seek work “elsewhere in the sport” and be involved in IAAF events in “any new capacity”.
Davies’ wife, Jane BoulterDavies, who also worked at the IAAF, admitted to misleading the IAAF ethics board over the payment received by her husband.
Boulter-Davies was provisionally suspended from the IAAF in 2016 and the sixmonth ban imposed yesterday was backdated so she is free to resume her work in the competitions department.
The IAAF said BoulterDavies will be back at work today along with Pierre-Yves Garnier, a senior medical and scientific manager, who failed to fully cooperate with the investigation into his payment of €10,000. Garnier was given a backdated three-month ban after the IAAF ethics board found that his conduct was not corrupt.