Australian Paid IOC Members in Sydney Bid

The Olympic bribery scandal widened dramatically Friday when the president of the Australian Olympic Committee said he offered $70,000 in inducements to two International Olympic Committee members from Africa the night before Sydney won the 2000 Summer Games by two votes.

Australia’s senior IOC member, R. Kevan Gosper, insisted that he was unaware of the offer made by John Coates and acknowledged that it could be considered a bribe and will probably prompt calls for Sydney to be stripped of the Games.

“It’s serious, a serious development for Sydney,” said Gosper, a longtime member of the IOC’s executive board.

The development unexpectedly broadened the scope of the scandal only a few hours after a Libyan delegate became the second IOC member to resign amid allegations of vote-buying in connection with Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

Bashir Attarabulsi tendered his resignation during a morning meeting in Lausanne with IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch. He resigned one day before a special IOC commission--headed by IOC Vice President Dick Pound of Canada--is due to wrap up its inquiry into events in Salt Lake City.

Samaranch has said that seven other members face possible expulsion in the Salt Lake City case. Additional resignations are expected this weekend. The Utah case has also sparked three other investigations; one of them, by the U.S. Department of Justice, is looking into the possibility of criminal wrongdoing.

Late Friday in Utah, meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that the son of a prominent IOC member implicated in the scandal surrounding the 2002 bid had asked Salt Lake bid executives for $30,000 to $35,000 the day before the city lost the 1998 Winter Games to Nagano, Japan.

Jean-Jacques Ganga, son of Jean-Claude Ganga of the Republic of Congo, had said he might be able to influence four votes, but did not promise them, a source close to the bid process told the Associated Press.

Salt Lake boosters reportedly did not pay the money to the younger Ganga and the next day in Birmingham, England, Salt Lake lost to Nagano by four votes.

In New York on Thursday, Pound had announced that the IOC inquiry would be expanded from its initial focus on Salt Lake to a review of every bid for the Games from the Summer Games of 1996, won in 1990 by Atlanta, through the 2006 Winter Games, to be awarded in June.

“It doesn’t make sense to think that Salt Lake is the first and only time this has happened,” Pound said Thursday.

Friday brought damning news from Sydney.

Coates, president of the Australian Olympic Committee and a leader of the Sydney 2000 bid, said he had offered $35,000 apiece to the national Olympic committees of Kenya and Uganda, an Australian newspaper said.

Coates said he made the offers to IOC members Charles Mukora of Kenya and Maj. Gen. Francis Nyangweso of Uganda at dinner at a hotel in Monte Carlo on Sept. 22, 1993, the night before Sydney beat Beijing for the 2000 Games.

The vote was 45-43--so close that it swung on one, perhaps two, votes.

At a news conference today in Sydney, Coates said the money was not a bribe but was meant to help finance sports in Kenya and Uganda. He said he offered the money because he believed that Sydney’s chances were “slipping away.”

“I wasn’t going to die wondering why we didn’t win,” he said.

Coates contended the payments--$5,000 a year--were within IOC guidelines and were similar to plans used by bidding competitors from Beijing and Manchester, England. He also said he was confident that the money was spent on sports, not for the individual African IOC members.

Coates also said he made the offers without the approval of the board handling the Sydney bid and had to get them approved “retrospectively.”

The Australian newspaper, meanwhile, reported that Coates wrote to Mukora and Nyangweso a few weeks before the September 1993 vote, offering to put them up at Sydney’s expense at the pricey Dorchester Hotel in London on their way to Monaco.

Mukora had been in Australia for most of last week, inspecting venues in Melbourne for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. He could not be reached for comment. Nyangweso also could not be reached.

Details of the offers were contained in a package of previously confidential documents--copies of the two letters to Mukora and Nyangweso plus 14 contracts between the Australian Olympic Committee and the national Olympic committees of 11 African countries as well as Thailand, Argentina and Colombia.

Coates released them to Australian news outlets Friday--perhaps in reaction to Pound’s announcement the day before, some Olympic officials in Lausanne theorized, as a preemptive strike.

“He’s right to get it out, but this information took us by surprise,” said Gosper, an influential member of the executive board who in the past has spoken out on issues for Samaranch.

Gosper said he had not known about Coates’ offer until told about it Friday evening by a journalist. “I was living in London at the time, fully supportive of the bid but not on the bid committee,” he said in an interview.

He said he wasted no time bringing the matter to Samaranch’s attention. He described Samaranch’s reaction as “serious concern.”

Gosper said the inducements Coates offered went well beyond goodwill: “It just goes to show you the pressure they felt.”

He went on: “It makes the case for making the [Sydney] bid file public so it can be examined. It may justify the need for a separate IOC inquiry.”

And, Gosper said, it is all but certain to prompt calls for Sydney to lose the Games. He asserted that Sydney ought not to be stripped--and certainly not without an investigation of bidding tactics by both Sydney and Beijing.

“We should just get on with having the Games where we decided they should be,” Gosper said, adding that he hopes the IOC executive board will take it upon itself at this weekend’s meeting to issue a declaration of support for both Sydney in 2000 and Salt Lake in 2002.

Earlier, the 61-year-old Attarabulsi, an IOC member since 1977, resigned amid revelations that his son, Suhel, had received tuition to attend an English-language course at Brigham Young University and a Utah community college, plus $700 a month for expenses, from Salt Lake bid boosters.

“Mr. Attarabulsi is a very good man,” Francois Carrard, IOC director-general, said at a news conference. “He didn’t follow the rules.”

The elder Attarabulsi used to be a vice president of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees of Africa and advisor to the Libyan secretary of youth and sport.

Another IOC member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there is worry now among some members for Attarabulsi’s life upon a return to Libya: “I fear for him. He’s a good member. I worry that he will go there, and his leader will say: ‘To the wall. At 5 o’clock we shoot you.’ ”

Finland’s Pirjo Haggman had resigned Tuesday. Her then-husband had landed jobs through bid committees in Salt Lake and Toronto.

Samaranch has said that 13 IOC members are under suspicion in connection with the Salt Lake bid. Nine--including Haggman and Attarabulsi--are suspected of serious matters and face expulsion; four are believed to have committed relatively minor infractions.

Jean-Claude Ganga allegedly received thousands of dollars from Salt Lake 2002 boosters, free medical care for himself and his mother and help from a bid committee member in making a land investment that netted him $60,000.

Pound’s six-member panel has found that Salt Lake boosters gave payments and gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to IOC members. Some members received more than $100,000 apiece, he said.

Carrard said Friday that Pound’s report is not complete. The panel is expected to meet for most of today in Lausanne; some of the implicated members are expected to arrive in Lausanne and defend themselves in person.

On Sunday, the IOC executive board is scheduled to review Pound’s report and recommend expulsions. It also may consider new ways of conducting the Olympic bidding process.

Samaranch has called a special IOC meeting for March 17-18 to vote on expulsions and changes in site-selection procedures.

Members who opt not to resign will be suspended pending a vote by the full assembly--now down to 113 members. It takes a two-thirds majority vote to expel a member.

Times staff writer Lisa Dillman contributed to this story from Melbourne, Australia.

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