More IOC Members Implicated

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

February 10, 1999 / 7:22 PM EST / CBS Sportsline

The U.S. Olympic Committee was linked for the first time to possible corruption and 10 more International Olympic Committee members were implicated for accepting extravagant gifts as part of a widening bribery scandal.

A 300-page report issued Tuesday by a Salt Lake Organizing Committee ethics panel provided the first detailed glimpse of the way IOC members -- now numbered at 24, roughly a fifth of IOC membership -- had their hands out. The report said there were more than $1 million worth of cash payments, scholarships, shopping sprees, vacations and medical expenses as Salt Lake bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

The extremes to which bid executives obliged, sharing another $1 million worth of donated air fares, hotel rooms and shopping with IOC members, were unethical, the panel concluded.

But the panel's report also demonstrated that senior U.S. Olympic Committee staffers seemed willing to curry favor with an IOC member from Sudan, whose country's athletes were being trained in the United States with Salt Lake money.

And in yet another setback for Olympic leaders, a major sponsor, John Hancock Insurance, said it was canceling negotiations with NBC for $20 million in ads to protest the IOC's failure to deal with the scandal.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt suggested every bid city undergo the wrenching self-scrutiny that Salt Lake City has suffered the past seven weeks on its path to setting a new standard of "forthrightness" in the Olympic world.

"We know what happened here was not right. So we're setting it right and we're paving the way for others to do the same," Leavitt said.

The ethics panel report called on the IOC and USOC to reform, including prohibitions on bid cities from having National Olympic Committees such as the one that was the conduit for much of Salt Lake's excesses. The panel also urged rules with teeth on IOC member-bid city relations and regular reporting of money spent on IOC members by bid cities.

The ethics panel blamed two men for the pandering: Tom Welch, bid committee president, and David Johnson, his vice president.

While Welch and Johnson were cast as the champions who brought the games to Salt Lake, the ethics report also cast them as two rogues who turned the city's legitimate lobbying effort into a secretive, no-holds-barred mission to win votes.

The report said the strategy had its roots in Salt Lake's four-vote loss to Nagano, Japan, for the 1998 Games. Welch, who told investigators he had turned down two offers of IOC influence for cash on the eve of that vote, apparently felt he had to up the ante if Salt Lake City was ever going to secure the games.

Four IOC members have resigned and five have been expelled so far, and the IOC indicated Wednesday it is prepared to consider expelling more members.

"The IOC remains fully committed to investigating and taking action based on all available evidence," the IO said in a statement. "The IOC executive board expects to receive the earliest possible recommendations of the ad-hoc commission after its review of the SLOC Board of Ethics report."

Tom Welch is under fire from an ethics committee report. (AP)

IOC executive board delegate Jacques Rogge, a member of the IOC's internal investigative panel, said he had not yet seen the report and could not comment in detail.

"We're going to look into it. That's our mandate, to cover everything regarding Salt Lake City," he told The Associated Press. "We expect to call for a meeting to review the report."

Rogge said a key issue for the IOC panel will be to determine whether members were guilty of actual ethical violations.

"You have to differentiate between what is a breach of the line, and what is so-called 'lavish treatment,'" he said.

Among the 10 newly implicated IOC members, Phillip Coles of Australia and Willi Kaltschmitt of Guatemala appear to have benefited the most.

The two men and their families made four vacation trips together to the United States, staying in expensive hotels and enjoying recreational outings. One of those trips was to the Super Bowl, and Welch and the bid committee picked up the $19,991 tab. Coles stepped down Wednesday from Sydney's organizing committee board for the 2000 Summer Olympics, pending an IOC inquiry.

Austin Sealy of Barbados, another of the 10 newly named IOC members, received $3,000 monthly payments through a company affiliated with a consultant, according to bid records the panel reviewed.

The others newly implicated were Maj. Gen. Henry Edmund Olufemi Adefope, Nigeria; Ashwini Kumar, India; Shagdarjav Magvan, Mongolia; Anani Matthia, Togo; Rampaul Ruhee, Mauritius; Siuli Paul Wallwork, Western Samoa; and Mohamed Zerguini, Algeria.

"Some of the more disturbing findings in the board of ethics report provide examples of disgusting and disguised transactions and phony contracts," said Robert Garff, chairman of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.

The report cited the USOC's involvement by detailing a November 1995 e-mail exchange among three USOC staff directors. It contained repeated references to an agreement to help train athletes from the Sudan at USOC facilities as part of Salt Lake City's campaign.

"A lot of promises were made to secure votes," wrote Alfredo La Mont, who, at the time, was the USOC's director for international relations.

When Jim Page, the USOC's deputy executive director for programs, balked at picking up Salt Lake's portion of the training ost after the city was awarded the 2002 Games, Tom Wilkinson, then assistant executive director, said it had to be paid because "a deal is a deal and Sudan delivered."

"May need Sudan again in future," Wilkinson wrote. "Don't burn bridges."

That appeared to be a reference to the Sudanese IOC member, Gen. Zein El Abdin Ahmed Abdel Gadir, one of the nine IOC delegates who have been expelled or resigned.

The USOC denied it was part of any quid pro quo.

"We were committed to help Salt Lake's bid, and to the extent that finding places at our training center for qualified athletes might have helped convince Sudan's IOC member to vote for it, we were pleased to do so. That was proper," USOC spokesman Mike Moran said. "But we did not take part in any effort to buy his vote."

Moran called Wilkinson's comments "very unfortunate," but conceded that La Mont's reference to promises connected to votes should have triggered some sort of USOC inquiry.

La Mont has since resigned his USOC position.

Meanwhile, David D'Alessandro, president and chief operations officer of John Hancock, was bitterly critical of most of the IOC leadership, including president Juan Antonio Samaranch.

He said he stopped talks with NBC to pressure the network -- the single biggest revenue source for the IOC with a $3.57 billion rights contract.

"We're not going to buy a nickel of advertising on NBC until we are confident the IOC is going in the right direction," he said.

While Jean-Claude Ganga, the IOC member from the Republic of Congo, got $250,000 -- the highest sum going to any IOC member's family -- it could not be determined whether he turned the money over to sporting groups in his country, as he claims, Jordan said.

One of the committee's more unusual relationships, according to the report, were the efforts on behalf of Sonia Essomba, the daughter of Rene Essomba of Cameroon, who died in August. Not only did it give her $108,350 in tuition and living expenses, but Welch dispatched his secretary to help her move furniture to a new apartment in Washington and acted as her attorney in breaking her old lease.

Essomba himself got $60,000 in cash from the bid committee.

Welch and Johnson have denied wrongdoing and on Tuesday, Tom Schaffer, Welch's attorney, said the report reinforced what Welch has been contending: There was no bribery, no exchange of gifts for votes.

Welch contends he was only building friendships with IOC members, not buying their votes, and that members of the bid committee board were aware of the spending. Leavitt, bid chairman Frank Joklik and others named by Welch repeatedly have denied knowledge of the details of the gift plan.

The ethics panel inquiry is just one of five investigations into Olympic misconduct. The others include probes by the IOC, USOC, Justice Department and Utah attorney general. ThGeneral Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, is moving ahead with an inquiry into how the Salt Lake Games are benefiting by what is certain to be millions of dollars in federal aid.

The ethics panel conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and reviewed 50,000 pages of documents before issuing its report.

The SLOC, which will stage the games beginning three years from this week, will be reorganized Thursday and take up recommendations from the ethics panel. Among the recommendations are that SLOC have twice-yearly reviews of significant spending and that it create an ombudsman so employees can report suspicions about ethical lapses.