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Coles responds Coles denies supplying Salt Lake City with secret dossiers
Posted: Wednesday May 05, 1999 12:43 PM
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Embattled Australian IOC member Phil Coles denied Wednesday he supplied the Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Games bid team with secret dossiers on IOC members, including notes identifying some members as being open to excessive gift-taking or bribes. Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported on Tuesday confidential briefings from Australia's department of foreign affairs and Coles' notes had been obtained by Salt Lake. The dossiers reportedly provided Salt Lake with a virtual blueprint of Sydney's successful bid for the 2000 games. The International Olympic Committee executive board deferred a decision on separate allegations against Coles on Tuesday and said it would investigate the latest revelations before making a decision on his case. The continuation of the saga led to new calls today for Coles to resign from the Sydney Organizing Committee to prevent it acting as a further deterrent to much-needed new sponsors and from hurting ticket sales, both vital to the Sydney games budget. SOCOG chief executive Sandy Hollway added his voice today to previous calls by president Michael Knight, saying he told Coles he should resign. "As the senior manager charged with the major task of preparing for the games, I judged that the continuing controversy was hurting our efforts," Hollway said. A number of existing sponsors had expressed concern about the matter, he said. Even Coles' staunchest ally, Australian Olympic Commission president and SOCOG vice-president John Coates, conceded he could not argue with Hollway's recommendation. However, Coates said he would not be asking Coles to resign. "Any decision on resigning is one for Phil," Coates said. Coles has stood down from SOCOG pending the outcome of his case and today vowed to return to the committee if he is cleared. Coles questioned the timing of the ABC report -- just hours before the IOC's expected decision on his earlier case -- and accused Knight of inferring he had passed on the material to Salt Lake. "Michael Knight has been saying certain things, and I think it quite outrageous that he is trying to infer that I handed all these documents over," Coles told ABC radio. He said he was concerned the documents had turned up in Salt Lake City, "but the inference that I might have sent them is quite wrong. Why are they trying to fit me with this?" Coles received the most severe reprimand short of expulsion from the IOC after its investigation into the votes-for-bribes scandal surrounding the Salt Lake bid found he had accepted hospitality beyond IOC rules and treated trips to the city as vacations with his partner, Patricia Rosenbrock. Coles is the subject of further claims that his ex-wife received gifts of jewelry worth about $6,500 from someone associated with the failed 1996 Athens bid. The almost 400 pages of documents which the ABC said it obtained from sources in Salt Lake City include assessments of IOC members by staff in 23 different Australian embassies and high commissions. The almost 400 pages of documents quoted by the Australian network included letters and cables from senior diplomats at 23 foreign missions, with one offering to get around rules on gifts to the IOC by having the embassy pay. They also included typed notes by Coles on individual IOC members, and handwritten notes by Rosenbrock, some of which the ABC reported were aimed directly at members of the Salt Lake bid. One note by Rosenbrock referred to Cameroon's late IOC member Rene Essomba as "devious," the ABC reported. Coles denied he was compiling sensitive dossiers on IOC members. "I was stationed in Europe and we sent back daily and weekly reports on progress, sometimes indicating how the bidding was going and who was likely to vote for us and who might not," Coles said. "I sent that back to the Sydney office and that was the last I ever saw of it." Up to 40 people would have had access to the documents he prepared, Coles said. Former Salt Lake Olympic leader Tom Welch told The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday that his group and and Sydney were "pretty close." "Sydney was really helpful to us," he said. "When they'd have events [to entertain IOC members], Sydney would invite us. What people don't realize is that Salt Lake had become part of the Olympic Family. We had been around so long, we weren't just a bid city any more. We cooperated with a lot of cities and talked process, including Beijing," which lost to Sydney by two votes in 1993. "Coles never gave me any information that was inappropriate," Welch said.
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