MP’S FURY AS IAAF CLEARS COE OF LYING

MP DAMIAN COLLINS has hit back at Lord Coe after the IAAF president was cleared by his organisation’s ethics board of misleading parliament. Last year Coe faced accusations of ‘distancing himself’ from knowledge of doping allegations in Russian athletics after apparent inconsistencies between what he told a parliamentary select committee in December 2015 and what then emerged in a joint investigationn by Sportsmail and the BBC. Coe (right) told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee that hat he was unaware of f ‘specific allegations’ about the corruption of anti-doping systems in Russia until he watched a German TV documentary in December 2014. But the BBC and this newspaper then revealed he had been sent an email that August by David Bedford which detailed a scheme to extort money from marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova to cover up positive doping tests. In 2016, Coe’s spokesperson insisted he had forwarded the email to the ethics board without reading the attachments, adding he was only guilty of ‘a lack of curiosity’. Yesterday the IAAF ethics board closed its investigation into Coe, who has always denied misleading MPs. But Collins, chair of the DCMS select committee, refused to back down. He said yesterday: ‘Lord Coe either knew more thathan he susuggested he did when hhe gave evevidence to the cocommittee, or hhe knew enoughenoug about ththe LiliLiliya Shobukhova case to have asked more questions about it within the IAAF at the time. The committee stands by the conclusions of its 2018 report.’ Coe said: ‘When I became president of the IAAF (in 2015) I promised greater transparency and integrity. ‘I hope this demonstrates that no one is above the rules and everyone in the sport is subject to the same scrutiny.’