Azerbaijan reportedly bribed AIBA to snatch more medals at boxing events

PanARMENIAN.Net - Under pressure by Olympic officials to address possible financial problems in his organization, the president of boxing’s international governing body in 2015 ordered an investigation by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The investigators focused on a $10 million loan in 2010 from a private company in Azerbaijan to help pay for a new boxing league in North America. The loan was never paid back, and investigators could not account for how more than $4.5 million of the money was spent. The federation, which goes by the acronym AIBA, could not say where the missing money went, The New York Times reports.

The loan was made by Benkons MMC, a conglomerate based in Baku, Azerbaijan, that seemingly had no sports-related businesses in its fold.The money was to go for the World Series of Boxing in North America, a new semiprofessional league.

Some former AIBA officials noted that the loan coincided with an uptick in medals by Azerbaijani boxers.

Since the loan was made, Azerbaijan has won nine medals, including four gold, at the three world championships since 2010, up from four medals, without a single gold, before that. Azerbaijani boxers won four medals in the past two Olympics, compared with three at the two Olympics before that.

Former insiders looked askance at the loan and suspected it was aimed at buying influence, whether successful or not.

In an email, Rudel Obreja, a former AIBA vice president from Romania who was fired after alleging that boxing matches at the Beijing Games in 2008 were fixed, called it “a very strange ‘loan’” that, based on his experience, could be explained only as a bribe.

“We boxing people know that Azerbaijan was very interested in boxing medals,” he wrote in an email to The Times.