Lamine Diack’s son was paid approximately $370,000 by a consulting company working for the Tokyo Olympic bid committee, before and after the Japanese capital was chosen as the location for the 2020 Games, reports Kyodo on 21st September 2020. Diack was then an influential IOC member.
The bid committee, currently shuttered, is named Black Tidings. This company had transferred the money that is said to be a part of a $2 million payment. Black Tidings is a consulting company based in Singapore.
A big take on this came with the acknowledgment for signing off on the $2 billion by Tsunekazu Takeda, the president of the Japanese Olympic Committee at that time.
Though having denied any wrongdoing, Takeda was forced to resign from the position in 2019, when the issues were in the middle of an investigation by French authorities. Takeda resigned not only from the committee but also from the International Olympic Committee.
Papa Massata Diack said in an interview with the Kyoto news agency that the money he had received was from a sponsorship deal in China and had nothing to do with Tokyo.
According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and several news organizations, including Kyoto, the payments made to Papa Massata Diack are the newest findings.
In the final vote of the IOC in 2013, at the meeting held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, it is believed that Lamine Diack, who is from Senegal, had influenced members from Africa. And it is this influencing that beat out Istanbul.
Lamine Diack is currently 87 years old and was one of the many heads of the governing body of track and field which is known as World Athletics. A week before, Diack was convicted of corruption in France, in relation to a doping scandal and sentenced to two years in prison.
Diack’s son Papa Massata Diack was also found guilty of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison, in his absence. The judge said $15 million was funneled to Papa Massata Diack’s companies, while his father was in charge of the track body.
Papa took the opposite stand denying the charges against him and called the trial a conspiracy against him and his father. He appeared at a news conference in Dakar where his words were,” I know a lot of things in the world of sport,” which probably hinted about knowledge of the people that he had of wrongdoing at other sports bodies.