(2/9/99)
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) _ The top two officials of Salt Lake City's Olympic bid were condemned today in an internal ethics investigation of the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the games.
The report concentrated on the actions of Tom Welch, who directed the successful bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and Dave Johnson, his top lieutenant.
The report also identified Craig Peterson as a central player. Peterson handled finances for the bid committee after he joined in 1990 and continued in that job after the city won its bid in 1995 and formed a new panel, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, to prepare for the games.
In summarizing the report, SLOC chairman Robert Garff said Johnson and Welch made unauthorized payments to International Olympic Committee members and their relatives and made a concerted effort to cover their actions from the bid committee's board.
Nobody disputed the mission of the bid committee was to secure IOC votes, Garff said, but "what was not part of the plan was Mr. Welch and Mr. Johnson's direct payments to IOC members."
Welch resigned as SLOC president in 1997 amid allegations he had abused his wife, but he continued to be paid $10,000 a month as a consultant. He was stripped of that consulting contract, as well as a $500,000 pension, last month. The same day, Frank Joklik, the volunteer chairman of the bid committee who replaced Welch as SLOC president, resigned and also demanded the resignation of Johnson, SLOC senior vice president.
Garff said large disbursements of cash and scholarship funds lacked documentation. He said that while the bid board could have provided better oversight, the ethics panel did not fault its members for the actions of Welch and Johnson.
"We know what happened here wasn't right, and we are setting it right ...," Gov. Mike Leavitt said just before the report was released. "Olympic corruption did not start here, but it must end here."
Earlier, Leavitt had said the ethics report should not be looked at as complete, since the panel did not have subpoena powers and some people refused to be interviewed. The board spent much of its time examining documents.
The ethics panel probe is one of five investigations into the payments of cash and free items to IOC members.
Unlike the IOC commission report last month, which focused on international committee members, the report by the SLOC ethics panel concerned the role Utah Olympic boosters played in seeking the 2002 Winter Games.
The IOC investigation said $800,000 in cash payments, scholarships, medical care and travel expenses was paid to 14 IOC members. So far, nine IOC members have been expelled or have resigned.
The ethics panel report, more than 300 pages long, primarily targeted Welch and Johnson, accusing them of hidden payments and deceptive practices that kept other members of the committee from knowing what was going on.
Peterson has refused to discuss his role in the bid committee, in part because he signed a contract that demanded his silence about Olympic matters when he left SLOC in 1996.
In Japan, meanwhile, officials said today they found no wrongdoing in Nagano's winning bid for the 1998 Winter Games.
Nagano Gov. Goro Yoshimura told Kyodo News service that the investigation showed that the bidders' treatment of IOC members was "within the scope of common sense."
