Samaranch Questioned by Justice Department

Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Spanish president of the International Olympic Committee, met Monday in New York City for six hours with Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents.

Samaranch, 79, was interviewed as a witness, not a target of the Justice Department’s investigation into Salt Lake City’s scandal-tainted winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

Among the topics were the roles of key Salt Lake City organizers and some IOC delegates. Samaranch also was asked about gifts reportedly sent to him--with particular attention paid to whether he received them or not.

“It was--I will not say kind, but it was very normal,” Samaranch said in a brief telephone interview after emerging from his lawyers’ New York offices.

En route to an airplane, he did not have time to elaborate on the session. A Justice Department spokesman declined comment.

The IOC was rocked last year by revelations that bidders in Salt Lake had showered IOC members and their relatives with more than $1 million in cash, gifts, bogus scholarships and other inducements.

In response, four IOC members resigned and six more were expelled. Then, in December, the IOC passed a 50-point reform plan that includes a ban on visits by its members to cities bidding for the Games--the very thing at the root of events in Salt Lake.

The scandal also prompted the Justice Department’s investigation into the possibility of criminal wrongdoing.

To date, the investigation has produced two criminal cases. One is a misdemeanor involving Salt Lake businessman David E. Simmons; the other involves felony charges filed against John Kim, the son of South Korea’s Kim Un Yong, a member of the IOC’s powerful Executive Board.

Before being indicted last Sept. 1, John Kim moved to Seoul. It remains unclear whether he will appear in an American court.

The IOC has issued the senior Kim a “serious” reprimand for his role in the scandal. But he has said, “I have nothing to be ashamed of in my life.”

During Monday’s session, questions were asked about the senior Kim as well as about Tom Welch, who directed the Salt Lake bid; Welch’s top aide, Dave Johnson; and Alfredo LaMont, the United States Olympic Committee’s former director of international relations. Welch, Johnson and LaMont have resigned their posts.

Sources familiar with the Justice Department’s investigation have said in recent weeks that it appears to be nearing conclusion.

Samaranch’s appearance was his second in six weeks before American inquisitors. He testified Dec. 15 before Congress.

Meantime, Australia’s most influential sports official, IOC Vice President R. Kevan Gosper, said Monday he had asked the IOC’s newly formed Ethics Commission to investigate a visit made by his wife and two young children to Salt Lake in 1993.

The matter is bound to refocus attention on Salt Lake when the Executive Board convenes in two weeks in Sydney, Australia, site of the Summer Games in September.

The scandal was bound to come up, anyway, if only because the meeting originally had been planned for Utah. It was moved to Australia mostly because of privately voiced concerns within the IOC over the Justice Department’s investigation. Gosper, though, is one of Samaranch’s key aides and a contender for the top job when Samaranch, IOC president since 1980, steps down next year.

Gosper said Monday that his wife and children, then 8 and 4, stopped for four days in late 1993 in Salt Lake while returning to Australia from London.

In a series of recent e-mails sent to Gosper, British journalist Andrew Jennings, perhaps the IOC’s most persistent critic, said he had obtained documents showing that about $10,000 in expenses during the 1993 stopover had been billed to the Salt Lake bid committee.

Gosper issued a statement Monday saying that his wife had sent a $2,000 check to Salt Lake organizers to pay for the stay and declaring that somehow the visit had become the basis of an “inflated” claim billed to the Salt Lake bid committee.

Gosper is a member of the newly formed Ethics Commission. He said he would take no part in its “deliberations on this matter.”