Baksheesh or bagsheesh (from Persian: بخشش bakhshesh) is tipping, charitable giving, and certain forms of political corruption and bribery in the Middle East and South Asia.
IAAF in crisis: a complex trail of corruption that led to the very top
One man’s decision to speak out over Liliya Shobukhova blackmail case exposed athletics’ rotten core and led to the suspensions handed down by the IAAF
Liliya Shobukhova crosses the finish line to win the women’s race at the 2010 London Marathon, a victory that was later expunged because of her doping offences. Photograph: Sean Dempsey/PA
The biggest scandal in athletics history started to slowly unfurl over drinks at a crowded Japanese hotel bar in February 2014. It was the night before the Tokyo Marathon but the Russian sports agent Andrey Baranov was troubled by something much deeper than his athletes’ chances. When Sean Wallace-Jones, a senior IAAF official he knew and trusted, sat next to him, he ushered him into a quiet corner and told him: “I need your help.”
Tentatively, Baranov began to reveal fragments of an extraordinary story involving doping, extortion and corruption. As he explained to a shocked Wallace-Jones, his athlete Liliya Shobukhova – the second fastest female marathon runner in history and a winner of the London Marathon in 2010 – had given €450,000 (£335,000) to senior Russian officials in exchange for covering up violations in her athlete biological passport.
That decision to speak out – at considerable risk to Baranov’s safety – led directly to the decision on Thursday by the International Association of Athletics Federations’ ethics commission to hand life bans to Papa Massata Diack, a former IAAF marketing executive and the son of the former president Lamine, along with Valentin Balakhnichev, the former president of the Russian athletics federation and IAAF treasurer, and Alexei Melnikov, the former chief coach for Russian endurance athletes. Meanwhile Gabriel Dollé, the most senior anti-doping official in track and field until 2014, was given a five-year ban.
The commission’s verdict was direct and damning. It found the four men had “acted dishonestly and corruptly and did unprecedented damage to the sport of track and field ... [having] conspired to extort what were in substance bribes from the athlete by acts of blackmail”.
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