French prosecutors probe USD 2 mn tied to 2020 Tokyo Games

French prosecutors said to that USD 2 million tied to Tokyo's winning bid for the 2020 Olympics was apparently paid to an account linked to the son of the disgraced former IAAF president in the months immediately before and after the Japanese capital won the games.
The French financial prosecutor's office said it has been told of payments totaling 2.8 million Singapore dollars that were marked "Tokyo 2020 Olympic Game Bid," from a Japanese bank to the Black Tidings company in Singapore.
The Singapore account is thought to have been held by a close friend of Papa Massata Diack, the son of former IAAF President Lamine Diack. The son is being sought by Interpol and the father is under investigation in France.

The French prosecutors probing suspected corruption by the Diacks and associates said they were told the transfers occurred in July and October 2013. Tokyo was chosen in September 2013 as the 2020 host, beating Madrid and Istanbul in a vote of the International Olympic Committee. As an IOC member at the time, the elder Diack had a vote.
Black Tidings, an apparent shell company in Singapore, has been linked by French prosecutors and a World Anti-Doping Agency-led investigation to Papa Massata Diack, who worked as a marketing consultant for the International Association of Athletics Federations, the governing body of track and field that his father ran for 16 years.

The prosecutor's office said it received information of the two "Tokyo 2020 Olympic Game Bid" transfers in December. The prosecutors did not name the source of their information nor say what the funds were for. But the office said it has evidence of "important purchases" in Paris that were financed by Black Tidings. It did not detail the purchases.
Based on this and other evidence, the prosecutor's office said it opened an investigation on Dec. 24, separate from their already existing and ongoing probe of the Diacks, "to determine the nature of the transactions ... And to verify if acts of corruption and money-laundering were committed in the process of designating the host city of the 2020 Olympic Games."

In January, a WADA-commissioned probe of IAAF corruption identified the holder of the Black Tidings account as Ian Tan Tong Han. It said Tan is such a close friend and associate of Papa Massata Diack that he named his child, born in 2014, "Massata.