Doping and corruption: judgment Wednesday for Lamine Diack - France 24

Paris (AFP)

The former boss of world athletics, Lamine Diack, will know his judgment in Paris at 1:30 p.m. (11:30 GMT) on Wednesday in the resounding corruption case against a background of Russian doping that has tarnished his career and the image of the sport.

To punish a "huge breach of probity which caused worldwide harm", and even if it is "at the end of his life", the financial prosecutors had requested four years in prison and a fine of up to 500,000 euros against the former president of the International Athletics Federation (IAAF, renamed World Athletics), during his trial in June for active and passive corruption, breach of trust and money laundering in an organized gang.

Before the 32nd chamber of the Paris Criminal Court, the Senegalese, 87, is on trial for having allowed the delay, from the end of 2011, of disciplinary proceedings against Russian athletes suspected of blood doping, in exchange for funding from Moscow.

He is also being sued for helping his son Papa Massata, then IAAF marketing boss, to appropriate several million euros in negotiations with sponsors.

- "PMD" still absent -

Key player in both aspects of the case, Papa Massata Diack, who remained in Dakar and tried in his absence, is targeted by the heaviest requisitions, five years in prison and a fine of 500,000 euros for corruption, money laundering in an organized gang and concealment of breach of trust.

"I refused to refer to French justice because it lacked impartiality," persisted Monday from Dakar "PMD", which has always refused to respond to French investigators.

Prison sentences were called for the other four protagonists: the former head of anti-doping at the IAAF, Gabriel Dollé, a lawyer who advised Lamine Diack, Habib Cisse, as well as two Russian officials tried in their absence, former president of the national athletics federation Valentin Balakhnitchev and former coach Alexey Melnikov.

- Gray areas -

Five years after his birth, the scandal has caused children: on the one hand, the case has generated the institutional doping scandal in Russian sport, which threatens the country with exclusion from the Tokyo-2020 Summer Olympics next;

on the other hand, the investigation of the French judges raised new suspicions of corruption in the attribution of the Olympics-2016 to Rio and 2020, for which Lamine Diack is indicted, still in Paris, and his son, "PMD ", targeted by a new international arrest warrant.

In this case, the Diack cross the road of Qatari sports leader Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, indicted for corruption in a section on the award of the 2017 and 2019 World Athletics Championships, and whose trial in Switzerland in a separate case from TV rights for the 2026 and 2030 World Cups opens on Monday.

Throughout the six days of his trial, Lamine Diack, whose sometimes disjointed and inaudible answers made the interrogations laborious, above all portrayed himself as a leader who "universalized" athletics.

Admittedly, he did concede to having given the order to spread out the sanctions against Russian athletes, 23 of whom were suspected because of their biological passports.

But in his eyes it was to prevent the bankruptcy of the IAAF, by safeguarding the negotiations with a sponsor, the Russian state bank VTB, and a broadcaster, the television channel RTR, public at the time, in view of the Worlds-2013 in Moscow.

For the rest, Lamine Diack, who had been decorated in the Kremlin at the end of 2011, denied having received funds from the Russian authorities to finance political campaigns in Senegal, contrary to what he had spontaneously said during the investigation, evoking 1 , 5 million dollars (1.2 million euros).

And he assured that he did not interfere in the work of his son.

In the absence of three of the six defendants, the trial did not remove all the gray areas, in particular on financial blackmail exercised among Russian athletes so that they are not suspended, for sums estimated at 3, 45 million euros.

Lamine Diack's lawyers demanded the release, but one of them, William Bourdon, especially asked the judges not to send the Senegalese to prison, nor to prevent him "from dying with dignity, embraced by the his, on his native land ".

The former boss of the IAAF hopes to obtain a lifting of his judicial control to return to the country, even if he remains indicted in the case on the Olympics, where he will soon be heard in Paris by the investigating judge.

© 2020 AFP