On June 13th, 2017, Rio’s ex-governor Sérgio Cabral was condemned in a trial court to 14 years and two months of prison for corruption and money laundering. There are still various open inquiries and more than 10 charges to be judged.
Piauí reports that, in order to diminish the sentence, Cabral promised to give details about the deal that made Rio de Janeiro the location of the 2016 Olympic Games. According to the ex-governor, in 2009, he, ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and ex-mayor Eduardo Paes authorized the businessman Arthur César Soares de Menezes, known as “King Arthur,” to pay a bribe to the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The French Prosecutor’s Office had already discovered that Arthur Soares paid 1.5 million dollars to the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, Lamine Diack, three days before the vote that gave Rio the 2016 Games on October 2nd, 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark. More than 500 thousand dollars were also deposited in Diack’s accounts after the vote.
Rio beat Madrid 66 votes to 32.
“Cabral continues to accumulate guilty verdicts – unless he can convince the prosecutors that it’s worth their while to make a deal with him. For this, however, he’ll have to review his memory, because the secret history of the Olympics is about to be uncovered,” concludes the report.