IOC Urged to Act on Ethics, Olympic Solidarity Concerns

(ATR) A governance review highlights IOC transparency as a key issue of concern – and called for its ethics commission to be given more independence.

The findings come from an IOC-commissioned report from the Lausanne-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD), which was tasked with reviewing the Olympic body’s governance.

It offers 33 recommendations to improve the IOC’s governance.

Professor Didier Cossin, an IMD board director, presented a summary of the recommendations to the IOC Executive Board on Monday. However, he told a press conference in Lausanne that the "diagnostic of weaknesses and strengths remain confidential".

Asked by Around the Rings about the biggest flaws in IOC governance, Cossin said: "I still have a concern around transparency and communication.

"Sometimes the IOC does the right things and doesn’t make it visible, sometimes it’s just hard to see and sometimes it’s not visible at all," he said.

He also cited the "quality of stakeholder engagement at large" within and outside the Olympic Movement as a significant concern.

"We view the IOC as the leaders of the sports world in governance. At the same time, this is always challenged," he added, saying that it was "a values-based organization that already has the right culture but has still space for improvement".

The IMD report urged the IOC to change the way its ethics commission operates.

Cossin said the ethics panel should be given the power to start investigations themselves "without passing by the [IOC’s] chief ethics and compliance officer" Pâquerette Girard-Zappelli.

It called for the IOC to grant an independent budget to the ethics commission and to "strengthen and formalize sanctions for ethical misconduct in general". Sanctioning powers should be carried out by an "independent third party", not the IOC’s ruling body.

Another recommendation called for the creation of a register of interests for the IOC’s top officials. Executive Board members should also be better educated about conflicts of interest. Sanctions for non-compliance in cases of conflicts of interest should be strengthened, the governance report said.

Olympic Solidarity Risks

Cossin also noted "risk areas" relating to the Olympic Solidarity Commission, which is chaired by high-ranking IOC official Sheikh Ahmad, who is linked to a FIFA scandal.

The ANOC and Olympic Council of Asia president quit the FIFA Council in April, denying any wrongdoing after being indirectly identified in U.S. court documents as the alleged source of about $1 million said to be used to influence Asian votes in FIFA presidential elections.

"We were concerned about the amounts and the control. This is a not-for-profit organization," Cossin told reporters, adding that the IMD was "pushing" for risks to be alleviated.

The report urges the IOC to give more complete and thorough information on the processes and financial flows from Olympic Solidarity, "possibly by constituting it as a fully owned subsidiary".

"If the IOC links the distribution of money to good governance standards it will also have to ensure that it is able to check compliance with the required standards," it says.

Cossin said: "Some of that is already being implemented."

He said 53 formal interviews and many more informal ones with the IOC administration were conducted to inform the report’s findings.

IOC director general Christophe de Kepper told the press conference that IMD was hired to do the analysis to build on the recommendations from the IOC’s 2014 reforms package focusing on "credibility, good governance and transparency".

He insisted the IOC was committed to delivering the recommendations and that work had already started on half of them.

"For the future, what we certainly are going to implement is a follow-up of each of these recommendations and regularly inform our board about the implementation of these recommendations," he said.

Reported by Mark Bisson in Lausanne.

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