Lamine Diack behind IAAF corruption, says WADA commission report

Published 01/14/2016, 10:00 AM EST

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – Lamine Diack, the former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), was responsible for organising and enabling the conspiracy and corruption that took place in athletics’ governing body, an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Thursday.

The commission was delivering the second part of its report, whose first instalment in November led to the banning of Russia from athletics for state-sponsored doping.

Diack, who was replaced by Sebastian Coe as president last August, is under investigation by French police for corruption and was heavily criticised by the report.

It said that Diack “sanctioned and appeared to have had personal knowledge of the fraud and the extortion of athletes carried out by the actions of the illegitimate governance structure he put in place”.

The report said the IAAF’s governance process was inadequate to prevent corruption, and the checks and balances of good governance were missing.

(By Karolos Grohmann, Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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Dhruv George is a senior Formula One and NASCAR analyst for EssentiallySports, having authored nearly 12000 articles spanning different sports like F1, NASCAR, Tennis, NFL, and eSports. He graduated with a PG Diploma in Journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications. Dhruv has also conducted interviews with F1 driver Pierre Gasly and Moto2 rider Tony Arbolino.