IOC stops Aiba subsidies over ‘governance’

PARIS: The International Olympic Committee ( IOC) has suspended subsidies to the International Amateur Boxing Association (Aiba) over it’s choice of interim president.

Gafur Rakhimov has been described as “one of Uzbekistan’s leading criminals” by the US Treasury Department, which has frozen his assets in the country.

“The IOC is extremely worried about the governance in Aiba,” said an IOC spokesman on Sunday.

“Last year, the IOC Executive Board had identified several specific requirements to be met by Aiba. Aiba was expected to take action to address these issues. Until the required actions have been fully addressed by the federation, the IOC had decided to withhold any future financial contributions to Aiba with immediate effect.”

Rakhimov, a 6 6 - year- old businessman, was elected as interim president of Aiba on Saturday following the sudden resignation of Italian Franco Falcinelli, who had himself taken over on an interim basis after Taiwan’s Wu Ching-Kuo stepped down two months ago after a bitter power struggle.

He is due to lead the federation up to elections in November.

The US Treasury claimed last month that Rakhimov had been linked to the illegal “heroin trade”. It’s not the first time Rakhimov has faced such accusations.

In 2002 he won a defamation case in Australia relating to a book, “The Great Olympic Swindle” written by British author Andrew Jennings, which implied that Rakhimov had been engaged in fraud, prostitution, assassination, gun running and plutonium smuggling, and that he was a gangster in the Soviet black economy.

In 2 0 0 0, when the book was published, Rakhimov had denied “categorical ly and unconditionally” any “involvement in drug trafficking” or being “a member of any organised crime syndicate”.

Yet, that same year he was denied entry to Australia by immigration officials ahead of the Olympics to protect “the safety and security of the Australian people”, then Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said.

In 1997, researchers at the Paris- based Geopolitical Drugs Watch named Rakhimov in an annual report on narcotics as one of Uzbekistan’s top three mafia bosses, heavily involved in the drugs trade.

Aiba went through a protracted and messy power struggle last year in Which Wu was handed a vote of no confidence by the organisation’s executive committee and then later suspended by its disciplinary commission. He was accused of financial mismanagement.

In November, he agreed to quit “in the best interests of both Aiba and boxing”, leaving Falcinelli as interim president.

But his sudden resignation has now left the controversial Rakhimov in charge.