Tokyo 2020 Board Members ‘Paid Millions & Gave Gifts To Olympic Bosses Ahead Of Bid Vote’

The Olympic Rings under a shadow of lobby payments and gifts once more? - Photo Courtesy: Pixabay

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Tokyo 2020 Board member Haruyuki Takahashi, a former executive at the marketing agency Dentsu Inc, which counts FINA among its clients, was paid $8.2 million by the committee that spearheaded Tokyo’s bid for the 2020 Games, according to financial records reviewed by Reuters.

In an exclusive report, the news agency cites Takahashi as saying that his work included lobbying International Olympic Committee (IOC) members such as Lamine Diack, the ex-Olympics powerbroker who headed the IAAF track and field federation, now known as World Athletics.

Takahashi admits to giving Diack, who is under investigation for corruption, gifts, including digital cameras and a Seiko watch.

“They’re cheap,” Takahashi tells Reuters.

Despite Olympic rules that forbid acceptance of financial rewards and gifts beyond a certain level for IOC members and others involved in bidding processes, Takahashi tells Reuters:

“You don’t go empty-handed. That’s common sense.”

Tokyo 2020 bid committee bank records seen by Reuters show that it paid around $46,500 to Seiko Watch, while the news agency reports:

“A senior official at the bid told Reuters “good” watches were handed out at parties organized as part of Tokyo’s campaign to win the Olympics, although he did not specify the brand.”

Reuters reported that the “IOC regulations allowed for the giving of gifts of nominal value at the time of the 2020 bid, but didn’t stipulate a specific amount.” However, the IOC made it clear to that that was not the case when noting to Swimming World:

“We would like to make it clear that the rules of the candidature procedure for the Olympic Games 2020 clearly stated: ‘No gifts, of whatever value, may be given to or received by Olympic parties or the IFs of Olympic sports’.”

Beyond the gifts, the payment for lobbying work are highly significant in exposing the vastly lucrative bidding business that goes on behind the scenes of the Olympic Movement: the sums represent “the single largest recipient of money from the Tokyo bid committee, which was mostly funded by Japanese companies”, Reuters reports.

The Tokyo bid committee also paid $1.3 million to a little-known non-profit institute run by former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, the head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee.

The payments to Takahashi and Mori were first reported by Japanese magazine Facta.

After his work wooing voters to Tokyo 2020’s cause, Takahashi was named to the board of the Tokyo 2020. Of late, he broke ranks to call on fellow organisers and the International Olympic Committee to drop their “Games must go on as planned in July 2020” mantra and move the big event to “2021 or even 2022”.

Since then, and beyond the lobbying of athletes and some federations and national Olympic Committees, the games have been shifted to a new start date of July 23, 2021.

Takahashi, meanwhile, acknowledged to Reuters that he had received the payments but declined to give a full account of how he used the money. He told the news agency that he had urged Diack to support the Tokyo bid and denied any impropriety in those dealings.

Takahashi writes the Reuters team, said that it “was normal to provide gifts as a way of currying good relations with important officials like Diack”.

Read the story in full at Reuters, including details of the French investigation into Diack and others

Catch up with the Olympic scandal unfolding in the reports of Jens Weinreich:

At Der Spiegel (in German):

“A camera, a watch and an Olympic award – The Summer Olympics have been postponed by a year, but they’re still in the headlines: New payments have raised suspicions that corruption was in play when Tokyo was awarded”

And at his website Sport and Politics (reports in German and English)

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Dick Beaver

4 years ago

Seems like that’s business as usual in making Olympic bids. Not much new in 3rd world vote buying.

W Bruce Murray

4 years ago

Oh there’s a big surprise. The IOC has notoriously been one of the most corrupt boards in the world over its entire life span. A large number of national OC’s are just as bad if not worse.

TK Shelley Causey Christie

4 years ago

Unfortunately, this has not new news. It’s been going on for several years.