OWN CORRESPONDENT, Lausanne | Sunday 8.00pm.
INTERNATIONAL Olympic Committee member Sam Ramsamy on Sunday denounced claims that African votes were up for sale for any city wanting to host the Olympics. Speaking from Bangkok where he is attending the Asian games, Ramsamy countered that: “The targets of these claims always seem to be Africans.”
“When Cape Town was bidding I made it very clear to everyone not to offer anything that was beyond the IOC instructions,” he said. “If anything improper had gone on I would have been the first to report it. Ramsamy’s response comes after Marc Hodler, a senior Swiss member of the IOC executive board, claimed on the weekend that a number of bidding cities paid millions of dollars in bribes to IOC members to secure votes.
Speaking in Lausanne, Switzerland, the 80-year-old lawyer alleged that agents had demanded up to one million dollars to deliver votes in the selection of host cities, and that he believed between 5% and 7%of IOC members had solicited bribes. There are currently 115 IOC members.
Hodler said a group of four agents, including an African IOC member, had been involved in promising votes for payment, although he declined to identify them. We are going to find out as quickly as possible what truth there is behind these allegations,” said IOC vice-president Dick Pound, one of the leading candidates to replace president Juan Antonio Samaranch who retires in 2002. –AFP