Corruption ’embedded’ at Lord Coe’s IAAF, claims new report

World Anti Doping Agency Wada has blamed for IAAF President Lamine Diack for the corruption scandals now troubling Athletics’ top governing body.

An IAAF leadership council – which included Sebastian Coe, the federation’s current president – was criticized for failing to take action while all of this was going on. “I can’t think of anyone better than Lord Coe to lead that”, said Pound. “All our fingers are crossed in that respect”.

Former IAAF president Lamine Diack poses with Australia’s World Champion Sally Pearson and Liu Xiang of China in 2012.

Diack also “created a close inner circle … ultimately functioning as an informal illegitimate governance structure”.

Cisse, who is said to have been assigned by the former president in November 2011 to specifically deal with doping cases regarding Russian athletes, is described in the report as being “at the heart of the schemes for disrupting IAAF results management by intentionally delaying results management and interfering with the pursuit of prosecution of Russian athletes”. “It can not be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on his own”, Pound is quoted as saying in his report, the first part of which, in November, presented evidence of state-sponsored doping in Russian Federation.

Last week, the ethics committee banned three senior officials for life for their role in corruption and blackmail, including the former head of the Russian athletics federation and former IAAF treasurer Valentin Balakhnichev.

Former IAAF president Lamine Diack has been charged with corruption and bribery for sweeping the Russian positive drug tests under the carpet.

The IAAF announced on January 5 a number of initiatives to prevent this happening again and Athletics NZ strongly urged the adoption of the remaining recommendations contained in the report to ensure that the situation didn’t happen again and to regain trust in the sport.

“We had, in the course of our overseeing the investigation, discovered certain events that the conduct of the employed individuals within or associated with the IAAF went beyond sporting corruption and have been in criminal in nature”, McLaren said.

“The corruption was embedded in the organization”, the WADA report stated.

In a detailed, 30-page response to the earlier WADA commission report, the IAAF on Monday conceded that there were “unexplained and suspicious delays” in four doping cases brought to the IAAF but strongly denied that any doping case was ever covered up.

The Jan. 14, 2016 screenshot of the Interpol website shows the wanted notice for Papa Massata Diack who is wanted by French authorities on corruption charges.

Speaking on the BBC, he said: “I find it very hard for Lord Coe to say he has got absolutely no clue – the only way is if a vice-president is a titular position that has no real contact with the sport”.

Coe succeeded Diack as IAAF president in August, after eight years as a vice president. At one point, fees paid by a Russian state bank for broadcast rights jumped from $6 million to $25 million, the report said.