Lamine Diack's defense calls for court indulgence

Lamine Diack, January 13 in Paris. REUTERS / Benoit Tessier

Text by: Laura Martel

The floor was in defense, on the last day of the trial of Lamine Diack, the former president of the IAAF, the international athletics federation and his 5 co-defendants, prosecuted for their alleged involvement in a system of corruption on Russian doping background. The defense of Lamine Diack asked for the release of all charges, in a two-voice argument.

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Maître Ndiaye first tried to dismantle the 5 counts of corruption, money laundering and breach of trust… with, as a preamble, a minimum admission: Lamine Diack chose to delay the sanctions against Russian athletes suspected of doping, time to finalize contracts with Russian sponsors.

An error, a bad decision, admitted his lawyer, but taken by a president forced to choose between ethics and the financial health of the federation, and which had only one objective: the survival of the IAAF. If morality was mistreated, however, there was no pact of corruption, according to Me Ndiaye, notably for lack of compensation.

Russian funding for the 2012 Senegalese campaigns? Lamine Diack has gone back on his words and there is no evidence, said the lawyer. For each of the charges, he thus maintained that Lamine Diack was unaware, not involved or in any case that the public prosecutor's office could not establish it with certainty.

Then Maître Bourdon, the high verb, castigated the prosecutors for having required 4 years in prison. "  A heavy and disproportionate sentence  " which could not be anything other than a "  death accelerator  " for an 87-year-old man, he denounced.

He urged the court not to make his client a scapegoat to compensate for decades of impunity in sport, "  do not give in to the swell of the judicially correct,  " he said. Believing Lamine Diack already heavily punished by his stay in France since 2015, the lawyer asked the court, if he came to sentence, "  not to make a decision that prevents him from dying with dignity, in the arms of his own, on his native land  ”.

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