Ex-Olympic Games supremo Nuzman is sentenced to jail for Rio bid bribes
RIO DE JANEIRO: Carlos Arthur Nuzman, a former International Olympic Committee member and president of the Brazilian Olympic body for more than 20 years, has been sentenced to 30 years and 11 months in jail for bribing Rio de Janeiro’s way to hosting the 2016 Games.
Nuzman, 79, who also headed the Rio organizing committee, was found guilty of corruption, criminal organization, money laundering and tax evasion. He remains free pending appeal.
Also sentenced to jail was former Rio Governor Sergio Cabral, businessman Arthur Soares and Leonardo Gryner, who was the Rio committee director general of operations.
The court had been told that all three and Nuzman coordinated to bribe the former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, Lamine Diack, and his son Papa Massata Diack for votes.
Cabral, who has been in jail since 2016 and faces other convictions and investigations, has admitted paying $2m in exchange for up to six votes in the IOC Session in 2009 meeting that awarded Rio the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
He said the money came from a debt owed to him by Soares.
Cabral, who governed Rio state from 2003-10, added that another $500,000 was paid later to Diack’s son with the aim of securing three more votes of IOC members. Lamine Diack was a senior IOC member at the time
He court ruling described Nuzman as “one of the main responsibles for the promotion and the organization of the criminal scheme, given his position in the Brazilian Olympic Committee and before international authorities.”
“He headed and coordinated action of the other agents, clearly as a leader.”
The judge said he will send the results of the investigation to authorities in Senegal, where Papa Massata Diack and Lamine Diack live, and France. A French court in 2020 sentenced Lamine Diack to two years in jail for corruption while leading track and field. Now 88, Diack returned to Senegal in May.
The investigation in Brazil began in 2017 after French newspaper Le Monde claimed that IOC members had been bribed three days before the vote.
In 2017, the IOC suspended Nuzman’s honorary membership which he has held since 2013.
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