Paris (AFP)
The national financial prosecutor's office on Wednesday demanded four years of imprisonment and a maximum fine of 500,000 euros against the former boss of world athletics Lamine Diack, at his trial for corruption on the background of doping in Russia.
Prosecutors demanded an even heavier sentence of five years in prison and a 500,000-euro fine against his son Papa Massata, a former powerful marketing advisor to the International Athletics Federation.
The former president, from 1999 to 2015, of the International Athletics Federation (IAAF) and his son, absent at his trial and for whom the prosecutor requested an arrest warrant, are tried in Paris, with four other people , in particular for having made it possible to delay, from the end of 2011, disciplinary sanctions against Russian athletes suspected of doping, in exchange for funding and for promoting sponsorship and TV rights contracts.
The National Financial Prosecutor's Office claims that Lamine Diack be sentenced for active and passive corruption, money laundering in an organized gang and breach of trust.
During his requisitions, the prosecutor François-Xavier Dulin agreed that the sentence required against Lamine Diack, "at the evening of his life" (87 years), was important, but that he had committed "a huge offense", "a breach of probity which has caused worldwide damage ".
Lamine Diack is also accused of having allowed his son, prosecuted for concealing breach of trust, corruption and laundering in an organized gang, to appropriate several million euros in negotiations with the sponsors, the Russian bank VTB, Korean Samsung or Chinese channel CCTV. Either by taxing his companies as intermediaries, or by taking "exorbitant" commissions, sometimes more than 20%, when he was already paid 900 dollars, then 1,200 per day of work as a marketing consultant at the IAAF.
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