An arbitrator for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) has dismissed a complaint about alleged referee bribery in international fencing, casting further doubt on accusations of corruption made by German broadcaster ARD against the International Fencing Federation (FIE) and its self-suspended president Alisher Usmanov.
The recently published decision states that all accusations of corruption and manipulation put forward against U.S. athletes and coaches who qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics lacked evidence and dismissed the case, according to a statement from Joachim Steinhöfel, the media rights attorney representing Usmanov.
This marks the second time in the last few months that a U.S. arbitrator has struck down claims of referee manipulations in fencing, which had garnered widespread media attention during the Olympic Games this summer.
“After a second decision by U.S. arbitrators, which discredits the ARD conspiracy theory as fictitious, all that remains is the spiteful slander of Mr. Usmanov, the fencers and the International Fencing Federation,” Steinhöfel told EU Today.
“It remains to be seen whether there is sufficient journalistic decency to correct the erroneous reporting,” Steinhöfel said.
In August 2024, Germany’s leading news network ARD broadcast a report about fencing at the Paris Olympics, in which journalist Hans-Joachim “Hajo” Seppelt accused Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov of establishing a system of “bribing referees” in the sport – a claim later repeated by other media citing ARD. Usmanov has been FIE president since 2008 until 2022, when he temporarily suspended his duties after coming under EU sanctions.
The German online news outlet Sport1.de and the Austrian newspaper Krone.at, which reprinted ARD’s statements, corrected their publications after being approached by Usmanov’s lawyers. However, ARD refused to correct its statements voluntarily, prompting Usmanov’s representatives to go to court.
On September 25, the Hamburg Regional Court in Germany issued an injunction against the ARD’s statements about Usmanov, ruling that the information in the report was “inadmissible suspicion-based reporting” and banning its dissemination, according to a FIE statement.
The ARD report cited the case of U.S. fencer Mitchell Saron, suggesting that the qualification of U.S. fencers for the Paris Olympic was based on unfair and faulty refereeing during the qualifying bouts. However, it has emerged that a month before ARD’s report wasreleased, an arbitrator for USOPC had already found no grounds to uphold allegations of manipulation in fencing and dismissed the case. ARD’s report did not mention this decision.
An arbitration award on a second U.S. case cited by ARD as “ongoing” has now been published: the accusations of corruption and manipulation put forward against athletes and coaches who qualified for the 2024 Olympics were declared groundless, and the case was closed.
“In addition to past journalistic failures of the ARD and its leading sports journalists, the fact that the results of U.S. arbitrations have been swept under the rug makes matters even worse,” the attorney Steinhöfel said in a statement to EU Today.
“The channel is spreading conspiracy theories put forward by dubious witnesses. Even when the courts find that the allegations are all unfounded, this is concealed in the reporting.”
Allegations of bribery in international fencing have been rejected both by prominent fencers and the FIE leadership. For example, as evidence of referee fraud, the ARD cited Georgian fencer Sandro Bazadze, who claimed he lost a match in the Olympic 1/8 finals due to “unfair refereeing.” The President of the Georgian Fencing Federation later dismissed Bazadze’s statement as “emotional” and issued an official apology to the FIE.
In a separate comment on the bribery allegations, FIE Interim President Emmanuel Katsiadakis noted that the main source for the ARD report was a former referee who failed to qualify in 2023 and was removed from the list of referees by a panel of judges. Katsiadakis added that manipulation by the refereeing team was all but impossible, as judges are assigned to competitions by a computer system just 30 minutes before each bout.
Usmanov, who was sanctioned by the EU in 2022 after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, has repeatedly stated he sees sanctions against him as illegal and is currently contesting them in court. As part of this legal effort, he has been contesting statements made about him in the media as incorrect or defamatory.
Earlier this year, the District Court of Hamburg ruled to prohibit and retract statements made by Forbes magazine, which claimed that Usmanov had “fronted for Putin” in an article that formed the basis for EU sanctions against him. In August 2023, the Austrian newspaper Kurier also lost in court to Usmanov after publishing an article that said Putin had called him “one of his favourite oligarchs.”
Image: RIA Novosti.
