Top 2 Salt Lake Officials Focus of Report on IOC

The two top officials behind Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games were singled out Tuesday for ethical violations by an internal inquiry that detailed how some International Olympic Committee members or their relatives were given cash, scholarships, gifts--even trips to the Super Bowl.

The report by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee’s independent ethics panel focused on Tom Welch, who directed the bid, as well as Dave Johnson, his top aide. The panel did not, however, uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Nor did it unveil broad new categories of misconduct. But, in a report of more than 300 pages, the panel did reveal details of the extravagant lengths Salt Lake City boosters went to, hoping to maintain “long-term, vote-influencing relationships” with IOC members. It also names two dozen IOC delegates--more than 20% of the membership and nearly twice the number previously implicated in the biggest corruption scandal in Olympic history.

It also paints a vivid picture of the culture of luxury and entitlement that IOC members had come to expect from suitors--material that may provide fodder for the U.S. Department of Justice, which has launched a separate investigation into Salt Lake City’s bid and will ultimately decide whether there was criminal misconduct.

An IOC inquiry, made public Jan. 24, has resulted in the resignations of four delegates and the expulsions of five more, pending a members’ vote next month in Switzerland.

At least three more members remain under investigation, and Dick Pound, an IOC vice president from Canada in charge of its inquiry, said Tuesday the SLOC’s report would provide welcome evidence. When asked how much more there might be out there to uncover, Pound said: “How long is a piece of string? Whatever’s there will be helpful to us.”

In summarizing the report for reporters, Robert Garff, chairman of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, said Welch and Johnson made unauthorized payments to IOC members or relatives and then hid their actions from the bid committee’s board. The panel did not total those payments, which run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Outside auditors failed to raise red flags.

“I knew everything you know, right now, today,” Anita DeFrantz, an organizing committee trustee and IOC vice president from Los Angeles, said in response to one reporter’s inquiry.

According to the five-member ethics panel, which was chaired by a former chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court, many large disbursements lacked complete documentation, and payments by wire transfers seldom included the required paperwork and approvals.

It appears, according to the report, that no public funds were spent improperly. The panel recommended a thorough audit.

Welch resigned from the organizing committee in 1997 amid allegations of spousal abuse. Johnson resigned last month.

Welch’s attorney, Tom Schaffer, said the allegation that Welch hid his activities from everyone on the bid committee board is preposterous.

“I find it absolutely incredible that all these astute business people could miss all this money,” he said.

Nonetheless, he also intimated that the ethics report actually amounted to a validation of sorts.

“If there’s no criminal conduct, let’s move on,” he said.

Johnson’s lawyer, Max Wheeler, could not be reached for comment.

Allegations that IOC members frequented escort services on visits to Utah could not be verified, according to David Jordan, Utah’s U.S. attorney from 1991 to ‘93, and a member of the ethics panel.

The report does document, however, just how creative the process of wooing IOC members can be. As Barry Watkins, the organizing committee’s Los Angeles attorney, put it: “This is a story of marketing run amok.”

Among the key examples of what Garff called “disgusting and disguised transactions and phony contracts”:

* A 44-year-old woman--the divorced daughter of Agustin Arroyo, the IOC delegate from Ecuador--said she was having “personal problems.” Though not a student, she got a “scholarship” that amounted to living expenses, as well as help getting jobs in Salt Lake City--one as a waitress at a chicken-and-ribs restaurant. Payments on her behalf totaled $23,000. Arroyo has been expelled from the IOC, pending the March vote.

* Kenya’s IOC delegate, Charles Mukora, reported that he needed “personal financial assistance.” He got about $30,000 in direct payments. Mukora has resigned from the IOC.

* With help from Welch, John Kim, the son of Un Yong Kim, a powerful IOC delegate from South Korea and the chairman of the IOC’s radio and television commission, got work with a Salt Lake City telecommunications firm. Kim is among those IOC members still under investigation.

The bid committee paid the firm, Keystone Communications, at least $45,000 for the younger Kim’s salary, taxes and benefits.

In a letter to the ethics board Jan. 30, the elder Kim’s lawyers said he did not know the bid committee was paying Keystone to employ his son.

* Jean-Claude Ganga, the influential IOC member from Congo, was given travel worth $115,000 for himself and his family; home decorating shopping sprees at Wal-Mart for his wife; medical care for himself, his mother-in-law and his wife (she had cosmetic surgery); a Utah land deal that netted him $60,000 profit; $70,010 in direct “unexplained” payments; and, in an arrangement with Welch, an investment partnership and a shared bank account.

Ganga has adamantly denied any wrongdoing and vowed to fight expulsion.

* The families of IOC members Phillip Coles of Australia and Willi Kaltschmitt of Guatemala went to the Super Bowl with Welch as their host, at a cost of $19,991.

Neither Coles nor Kaltschmitt could be reached Tuesday for comment.

* At the same time he was director of international relations and protocol for the U.S. Olympic Committee, Alfredo LaMont formed two consulting companies on the side. One of them, called ARCA Inc., was used to pass $3,000 a month from the bid committee to Austin Sealy, an IOC member from Barbados. The bid committee paid ARCA a total of $18,185.

LaMont recently resigned his USOC post.

Finally, in perhaps the most nuanced example of the way Olympic hopefuls court--but don’t buy outright--votes, the Salt Lake City bid committee paid more than $40,000 to support the training of three athletes from Sudan for the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, the report said.

In an exchange of e-mail messages Nov. 11, 1995, U.S. Olympic officials considered discontinuing payments for the athletes’ training but ultimately concluded the program was necessary to the continued good graces of the “Sudanese IOC members,” the report said.

“A lot of promises were made to secure votes,” LaMont wrote in one such message--a remark that Johnson told the ethics panel was “standard operating procedure for the USOC.”

After this e-mail exchange, the report said, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee started making payments to the USOC on behalf of the Sudanese athletes.

Clearly, Jordan said, the intent behind such payments was to obtain the vote of the Sudanese IOC member, Gen. Zein el Abdin Mohamed Ahmed Abdel Gadir.

Gadir resigned last month from the IOC, and whether the plan worked may never be known--because balloting is done in secret. Nonetheless, Jordan said, “It happened, and it is not isolated.”