A Canadian consultant paid $58,000 by the Salt Lake Bid Committee says he only provided "access" to as many as 30 members of the International Olympic Committee.
Mahmoud El-Farnawani told the Deseret News in a telephone interview from his home near Toronto that he did not attempt to buy IOC votes on behalf of Salt Lake City's bid for the 2002 Winter Games.Instead, he said his job was to set up meetings between Salt Lake bid leaders and members of the IOC. El-Farnawani said hewas hired by Salt Lake in 1993 and worked for several months as a marketing consultant.
"That doesn't mean anything other than consultation and giving an access to the bid committee of Salt Lake City to talk with the IOC to make them friends, not strangers," El-Farnawani said.
El-Farnawani said he dealt with four people on the bid committee: former President Tom Welch, then-Chairman Frank Joklik, then-Vice President of International Relations Dave Johnson and Salt Lake Mayor Deedee Corradini.
"They were all very nice people working for their beloved city to succeed," El-Farnawani said. "Honestly, the Salt Lake people, I didn't see any wrongdoing from them."
The IOC is investigating charges of corruption surrounding Salt Lake City's bid for the 2002 Winter Games, including the role of lobbyists hired to help win votes.
Besides El-Farnawani, tax returns filed by the bid committee show that Mutaleb Ahmad of Kuwait was also paid as a consultant. Ahmad, who earned $57,600, was the director general of the Olympic Council of Asia.
El-Farnawani declined to say which IOC members he contacted, other than those from Arab nations. "If you trust me to work with people, I won't expose who I contacted," he said.
But he did say his contacts extended far beyond the Arab world. El-Farnawani was born in Egypt and was that nation's Olympic volleyball coach at one time. He said he has been involved in sports since 1954.
"Arab people do not like to feel they are just connected with an Arab like them. . . . I know so many people from the IOC," El-Farnawani said. "I contacted maybe 30 people in a courteous way, asking them to come to lunch or dinner."
He said he never told the Toronto Sun he "signed a contract with Salt Lake City and assured them of all the Arab votes." The newspaper attributed that quote to him in 1995.
George Gross, the Toronto Sun reporter who interviewed El-Farnawani in Budapest in 1995 shortly after the IOC overwhelmingly voted to give Salt Lake City the the 2002 Winter Games, said he stands by his story.
That quote has been widely circulated since a leading member of the IOC, Marc Hodler from Switzerland, made a series of startling allegations earlier this month about so-called "agents" selling the votes of IOC members.
Hodler said there's a small band of people who charge bid cities up to $5 million or more and claim to be able to deliver a bloc of votes from Africa and other parts of the world.
However, Hodler has not been able to provide IOC investigators with evidence to back his allegations.
Backers of Toronto's bid for the 2008 Summer Games have said El-Farnawani worked for them on a volunteer basis until April. He said he plans to consult on behalf of Cairo's bid for the same Olympics.
When his name surfaced in news reports last week as one of the agents that Hodler was referring to, El-Farnawani was in Cairo. He spoke Monday to the Deseret News, he said, to help explain what he did for the 2002 bid.
El-Farnawani described his role as bringing together as friends. "If I know you as a friend, and I bring you to another friend, you feel you are talking to a friend, not a stranger," he said.
"My concentration was really to say to my close friends this was the best city. . . . You should help them on their merits, they have a better city than the others," El-Farnawani said.
El-Farnawani said he also worked for Sydney's successful bid for the 2000 Summer Games as part of a three-member team of hired lobbyists. But he said he did not work directly with any consultants in Salt Lake.