IAAF: Ex-Coe aide lied over payment, can still work in sport
LONDON — IAAF President Sebastian Coe’s former right-hand man was expelled from athletics’ governing body on Tuesday after admitting to concealing cash payments during the scandal-plagued previous administration. But Nick Davies was cleared of corruption and allowed to continue working in athletics and at IAAF events.
The senior IAAF official was found to have misled investigators from the World Anti-Doping Agency, French judicial authorities and the IAAF over the 30,000 euros (now $32,000) received ahead of the 2013 world championships.
The payments from then-president Lamine Diack came via his son Papa Massata Diack, a former marketing consultant at the IAAF who was last year banned for life from the sport in a bribery and extortion case involving Russian doping. Both father and son are being investigated by French prosecutors on corruption charges linked to coverups of Russian doping cases.
Davies served as communications director and deputy secretary general under Diack and, after Coe’s election in 2015, was promoted to director of the president’s office. The IAAF ethics panel accepted that Davies did not act corruptly and was not part of a coverup of Russian doping cases but did criticize him for deceiving the probe.