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Tokyo Olympics bid team made secret payment: Newspaper

LONDON — Scrutiny of the awarding of the 2020 Olympics to Tokyo has been intensified following allegations linking payments of around €1.3 million (S$2.03 million) by its bid team to a bank account at the centre of a current athletics corruption scandal.

LONDON — Scrutiny of the awarding of the 2020 Olympics to Tokyo has been intensified following allegations linking payments of around €1.3 million (S$2.03 million) by its bid team to a bank account at the centre of a current athletics corruption scandal.

According to The Guardian, the transactions are being probed by French police, who were already investigating the bidding processes for the next two Summer Olympics as well as those for every athletics World Championship this century as part of a widespread bribery and money-laundering inquiry.

The payments were alleged to have been directed into a secret bank account in Singapore known as Black Tidings, which has been linked to Papa Massata Diack, the son of Lamine Diack, the former International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president.

Lamine, who headed the IAAF between 1999 and last year, was still an influential International Olympic Committee (IOC) member in 2013 when Tokyo beat fellow bidders Istanbul and Madrid.

The Senegalese currently faces criminal charges in France over allegations that he took more than €1 million in bribes from Russian athletes and officials to cover up failed drug tests. He has been charged with corruption, money laundering and conspiracy and is out on bail.

Paris prosecutors are also seeking Papa Massata, who is the subject of an Interpol international alert on charges of blackmailing athletes who failed drug tests. The disgraced former IAAF marketing consultant, presently in Senegal, was banned for life by the IAAF’s ethics commission in January over corruption and cover-up charges linked to Russian doping.

According to The Guardian, the Black Tidings account is held by an Ian Tan Tong Han.

The account was discovered to have channelled €300,000 to Russian marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova in March 2014 as a refund payment after a botched attempt to cover up a positive drugs test.

Questions about the awarding of the 2020 Olympics to Tokyo were first raised in January, in the second report of a World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) commission into systematic drug-taking in Russia. The report cited transcripts of discussions between another of Lamine’s sons, Khalil, and “Turkish individuals” which claim that Turkey lost Lamine’s support for its bid for the Games because it did not pay sponsorship of around US$5 million (S$6.85 million) either to the IAAF or Diamond League, while the Japanese did pay such a sum.

Tokyo 2020 said at the time the details highlighted in the report were “beyond our understanding”.

Yesterday, Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee spokeswoman Hikariko Ono said in a statement to AFP that the committee “has no means of knowing these allegations” when asked about The Guardian report.

The Japanese government also said yesterday that its bid was clean. “My understanding is that the bid process of the Tokyo 2020 Games was done in a clean way,” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the government’s top spokesman, at a press conference. “Japan will take appropriate measures if the French justice authorities make any request” but has no intention to question the Tokyo 2020 team based on the report, added Suga.

Japanese advertising and public relations conglomerate Dentsu also denied any link to Ian Tan when contacted by AFP.

The Guardian had described Tan as a “consultant to Athlete Management and Services (AMS), a Dentsu Sport subsidiary based in Lucerne, Switzerland”. However, a Dentsu spokesman told AFP: “AMS is not our subsidiary and we have never hired a consultant. We have never been investigated by the French authorities nor been asked to cooperate.”

The IOC has confirmed that it had been in touch with French magistrates from the start of the criminal inquiry and was now a civil party to the investigation. AGENCIES

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