Rio probe puts IOC back under corruption spotlight

LAUSANNE, Switzerland: The Rio 2016 cash-for-votes inquiry in Brazil has placed the International Olympic Committee under a fresh cloud of corruption less than a week before it is due to award the 2024 Games to Paris.

Almost two decades after its image took a battering with the Salt Lake City 2002 bribery affair the IOC finds itself at the centre of a new scandal.

It centres on Brazil’s Olympics chief, Carlos Nuzman, who Brazilian officials on Tuesday accused of being the “lynchpin” in a plot to bribe the IOC into awarding Rio de Janeiro last year’s Games.

Former IOC member Nuzman was taken in for questioning with his passport confiscated and his house searched.Brazilian police say they are probing “an international corruption scheme” aimed at “the buying of votes for the election of (Rio) by the International Olympic Committee as the venue for the 2016 Olympics.”

Rio won the right to hold South America’s first Olympics, beating off competition from Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago at a 2009 IOC Congress in Copenhagen.An arrest warrant was issued for Arthur Soares, a businessman who won lucrative pre-Olympics contracts from Rio’s government.

One of his former associates was arrested in Rio and 11 properties were subjected to search and seizure raids. One of them was in Paris, French authorities said. Prosecutor Fabiana Schneider told a press conference that Soares allegedly bribed the son of disgraced Senegalese IOC member Lamine Diack before the 2009 vote in Denmark.

Diack, who was head of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) at the time, had considerable influence over African votes on the IOC.Nuzman, Schneider said, had been the “lynchpin” between Soares and the son, Papa Massata Diack.

One seasoned Olympic observer told AFP on Wednesday the dramatic developments in Rio could prove a disaster for the IOC.“The IOC can currently defend that it was the action of a rogue group masterminded by the Diack family,” said Patrick Nally, the Briton who founded the IOC’s ‘TOP’ sponsorship programme.  —