Bribery scandal emerges overTokyo Olympic organizing committee

Bribery scandal emerges overTokyo Olympic organizing committee. May. 13, 2016 07:45. by 권재현기자 confetti@donga.com.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games are engulfed in a bribery scandal. It has been revealed that Japan provided a huge sum of payment to the members of the IOC in the bidding process.

The British daily Guardian reported on Wednesday that French prosecution, which is investigating the corruption case of former IAAF President Lamine Diack (83), said that a payment worth 1.3 million euros was sent by the Tokyo Olympic bid team to a secret bank account in Singapore in September 2013, before Japan won the bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games. Mr. Diack was an IOC member who held the voting right to decide the venue of Olympic Games. It has been found out that the bank account belongs to Papa Massata Diack, Mr. Diack’s son and IAAF marketing consultant.

The secret account came to light while the French prosecution was investigating the former IAAF president’s alleged bribery case over the doping test on a Russian marathon runner, and the investigation was expanded into another corruption case regarding the bidding processes for the venue of the 2016 and 2020 Olympic Games. The IOC, which was already dealt a hard blow owing to the bribery scandal over the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, is under pressure for reform, and Japan is being denounced that it bribed its way into hosting the Olympic Games.

A former long jumper on the French national team from Senegal, Lamine Diack is a big wig in the sports circle, who served as the president of the IAAF from 1999 to 2015. He sat on the IOC concurrently from 1999 to 2013, and was made an honorary member in 2014, but he resigned in November last year over a bribery scandal. The bank account that was used to receive the payoff worth 300,000 euros turned out to be the same account as the Singaporean bank account.

It has been revealed that the former IAAF president had accumulated "black money" after recruiting his two sons, Papa Massata and Khalil, as marketing consultants by using them as channels for kickbacks. The secret account was under the name of a man named Ian Tan Tong Han, who is close to Papa Massata enough to name his own son after the man. The Athlete Management and Services, in which he is serving as a consultant, is a subsidiary of Dentsu Sport, the biggest Japanese advertisement agency that was set up to market and deliver the commercial rights granted to it by the IAAF. Right before the tenure was expired, Lamine Diack made a decision to extend Dentsu’s rights to 2029 on his own. And now the arrow of suspicion is pointing at Dentsu.

Asked for a response by the Guardian, the Japanese Olympic Committee, which was in charge of the bidding process, gave an unreasonable answer that it could not respond as “its press team was away on business”. Japan's top government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, made it clear that the government has no plans to conduct its own investigation responding, "We understand the campaign for the 2020 Tokyo Games was conducted in a clean way.”