Diack will die if he's jailed: Defence

PARIS • Lawyers for former world athletics chief Lamine Diack, who is on trial for corruption, on Thursday pleaded for their client not to be made a "scapegoat" and said that the 87-year-old would die in jail if sentenced to a prison term.

French financial prosecutors on Wednesday sought a four-year jail sentence and a maximum of €500,000 (S$781,100) fine for Senegal's Diack. They said that he and his son, Papa Massata Diack, were at the heart of a scheme that solicited bribes of millions of euros from Russian athletes to cover up failed doping tests and allow them to continue competing.

Diack, who led the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) - now known as World Athletics (WA) - from 1999 to 2015, faces charges of "giving and receiving bribes", "breach of trust" and "organised money laundering". Prosecutors had sought a five-year sentence for Papa, who remains in Senegal where the authorities refuse to hand him over to French authorities. Diack's lawyers said there were "no tangible elements" proving his participation in the scheme, and put the blame on his absent son.

"One has to distinguish between the son and the father," said defence lawyer Simon Ndiaye, adding that Diack's main fault had been to hire his son as a marketing consultant for the IAAF, a position that the latter abused.

Ndiaye called on the judges to "ignore appearances, be wary of purely moral judgments" and "resist the temptation to make this case an exemplary case... and Lamine Diack a scapegoat to purify the IAAF".

Stressing the fragile health of Diack, his second defence lawyer William Bourdon said: "Sending him to the jails of the Republic can only be a death accelerator."

He called for empathy should the judges get "carried away by the swell of the 'judicially correct'" and find his client guilty. Bourdon also asked that the judges "do not take a decision that stops him from dying with dignity, surrounded by his loved ones, on his native land".

Diack, he continued, had "already been very heavily punished, chastised", recalling that he had been unable to leave France since his arrest in November 2015.

Diack had told the court he agreed to delay bans for 23 Russian athletes, but denied he knew that officials from the body had directly or indirectly asked those athletes for hundreds of thousands of euros to hush up their cases.

He said he was acting to safeguard "the financial health of the IAAF" because the federation was negotiating major sponsorship contracts with Russian bank VTB and a Russian broadcaster at the time.

Summing up his defence on the last day of the trial, Ndiaye admitted that his client's actions had not been "ethical" but "it is not criminal". He also had a parting shot at Sebastian Coe, who took over from Diack as head of WA.

"Was he the prince who awaited the end of the king's reign to ascend the throne, did this prince keep silent?" he said.

The court has heard that WA is claiming €41.2 million compensation from the Diacks.

It said the doping scandal led major sponsors adidas and Nestle to sever ties with the federation.

The verdict is slated for Sept 16.

REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE