The call will not have changed anything. Papa Massata Diack, son of former world athletics boss Lamine Diack, was sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison for corruption in the Russian doping scandal in 2011, a case that had shaken the world of sport. In his absence, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed the sentence at first instance, but reduced the fine by half, to 500,000 euros. She also sentenced the former legal adviser to the boss of the International Athletics Federation (IAAF), Habib Cissé, to a three-year suspended prison sentence, a sentence below the requisitions of the general prosecutor’s office.
Former IAAF marketing consultant, Diack fils was sentenced in September 2020 to five years in prison and a fine of one million euros for complicity in a bribery scheme aimed at hiding cases. blood doping in Russian athletes in 2011, a year before the London Olympics. By dragging out the sanction procedures against these athletes with suspicious biological passports, the International Federation had allowed some of them to participate in these Games.
A “banana organization”
In return, the major Russian sponsors had renewed their partnership contracts with the IAAF, which has since become World Athletics, for the 2013 Worlds in Moscow. Papa Massata Diack, nicknamed “PMD”, had also been found guilty of having embezzled funds to the tune of fifteen million euros on sponsorship contracts, via an assembly of front companies. Aged 57, he has always claimed his innocence from Senegal, a country he says he cannot leave because he is under judicial supervision in the same case.
The lawyer for the international federation, Me Régis Bergonzi, had denounced him during the appeal trial in January “banana organization” of the IAAF in the time of Lamine Diack, between 1999 and 2015, a president surrounded by faithful and who monetized loyalties. At first instance, five other protagonists, including Lamine Diack, were convicted. Diack senior and the former IAAF anti-doping chief, Frenchman Gabriel Dollé, died in 2021 and the charges died out. Two Russian sports officials at the material time, Valentin Balakhnitchev and Alexei Melnikov, did not appeal.
In January, only the former presidential legal adviser Habib Cissé appeared before the court of appeal. Sentenced at first instance to three years in prison, including two years suspended, a fine of 100,000 euros and a five-year ban on practicing as a lawyer, he has also always denied having been an accomplice in the Russian affair. The 52-year-old former personal adviser to Lamine Diack assured the bar that the notifications concerning several athletes to the Russian federation (ARAF) had been processed at the “case by case”depending on the degree of suspicion of doping, pointing out that all suspected athletes were eventually suspended.
A Russian marathon runner at the heart of the case
Habib Cissé was also found guilty of having received 3.45 million euros, withdrawn from Russian athletes in exchange for a «protection totale», that is to say their disappearance from the list of athletes suspected of doping. The investigators had found a list at his home containing the names of several athletes and sums of money. They had also exhumed a conversation by SMS with “PMD” where it was a question of “refund”.
The affair, which had shaken the world of sport, had been revealed by the agent of the Russian marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova, who had paid 450,000 euros to disappear from the list. Eventually suspended in 2014, she had requested a refund and received 300,000 euros from an account in Singapore which was traced back to “PMD”. It fell to the French courts to arbitrate the case because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) decided, in August 2015, to seize the hexagonal National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) on the grounds that two Frenchmen, the doctor Gabriel Dollé and the lawyer Habib Cissé, would have lent their assistance to this affair which sheds a harsh light on the sport business.