Perhaps the most damaging testimony in the case came from Cabral, the former governor, who is serving what is effectively a life sentence for fraud and corruption.Ĭabral told the court that the scheme to secure votes through bribery was arranged between Nuzman and Lamine Diack, a longtime Olympics power broker from Senegal and the father of Papa Massata Diack. Gryner and Diack, the son of a former head of track and field’s global governing body, swapped emails just after Rio de Janeiro overcame bids from Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo to stage the 2016 Games. official convicted of corruption in France, discussing bank transfers in October 2009. Maleson was among the witnesses in Nuzman’s trial, which also featured the introduction of emails between Gryner and Papa Massata Diack, a former I.O.C. The multibillion-dollar project was mired in allegations of graft that implicated some of Brazil’s biggest construction companies even before the revelation that Brazil may have only secured hosting rights thanks to vote-buying behind the scenes. The court’s verdict is the latest reminder of how the Rio Olympics, billed as a coming-out party for South America’s most populous nation, instead ended up as a stain on Brazil’s reputation. “The culpability is high, as Carlos Arthur Nuzman was the main creator of the illicit scheme examined in these records and thus acted taking advantage of the high position achieved over 22 years as President of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, which is why his conduct must be valued more rigorously than that of any corrupt person,” Bretas wrote in his ruling. Arthur Soares, a Brazilian businessman known as King Arthur, who was said to have provided $2 million in bribe money, was sentenced as well. The former Rio de Janeiro governor Sérgio Cabral, already serving a 200-year prison sentence for a string of other corruption-related offenses, and Leonardo Gryner, a close confidant of Nuzman’s who was also the former director general of Rio 2016, also received prison terms. The verdict, laid out in a 50-page written judgment by Marcelo Bretas, a judge with experience in presiding over high-profile corruption cases, singled out Nuzman as the linchpin of a scheme to buy the votes of sports officials in an effort to secure the hosting rights to the Games.
He will not have to serve his sentence until those appeals are exhausted. Nuzman, 79, will appeal the verdict, his lawyer said. Law enforcement officials who conducted a raid on his home in 2017 found about $155,000 in cash and a key to a vault in Switzerland in which 16 gold bars were discovered. Nuzman, who also served as the head of the Rio 2016 organizing committee, was found guilty of corruption, criminal organization, money laundering and tax evasion in a ruling published late Thursday.
The verdict against Carlos Arthur Nuzman, the former longtime head of Brazil’s Olympic committee and once a towering figure within the International Olympic Committee, came four years after he was detained by the authorities as part of a joint investigation into sports corruption by investigators in Brazil and France. The man who brought the Olympics to South America for the first time has been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison after a judge in Brazil ruled that Rio de Janeiro’s success at securing the 2016 Summer Games was built on a bribery scheme.
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