GENEVA (AP) – The troubled International Boxing Association may have to hold its presidential election again after the court of…
GENEVA (AP) – The troubled International Boxing Federation may have to hold its presidential election again after Tuesday’s Arbitration Court for Sport ruled in favor of a candidate who was excluded from the original vote.
The court said it upheld an appeal by Dutch boxing official Boris van der Vorst that he should not have been removed from the paper vote last month for a minor violation of campaign rules.
However, it has not ordered the IBA to repeat the vote that re-elected its President, Umar Kremlev, by acclamation on May 14.
Commenting on the ruling, the IBA said it would “take legal advice on its implications and consider appropriate action” when its board meets on June 24 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Van der Vorst was Kremlev’s intended opponent until an election review committee declared him unelectable a day before the scheduled vote.
The Election Oversight Board removed Van der Vorst and other candidates for elected IBA positions for alleged “prohibited cooperation” and campaigning.
A CAS judge ruled that Van der Vorst, but also Kremlev, had only broken a rule about early campaigning.
The minor rule violation “would have merited a light sanction such as a warning or no sanction at all, but not a disqualification from the election,” the court said in a statement.
Election uncertainty has fueled skepticism at the International Olympic Committee about the IBA’s push to reinstate boxing as the recognized organizer of boxing ahead of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
Boxing’s governing body was stripped of IOC recognition ahead of last year’s Tokyo Games, and the sport was dropped from the original schedule for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.
The IOC has long criticized the boxing federation for its leadership, finances and integrity of bouts at championships, including the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Six years ago, Olympic boxing and its governing body was run by CK Wu, then a longtime IOC member.
Wu was succeeded by Gafur Rakhimov, who was elected for his good reputation despite IOC warnings. Rakhimov was on a US Treasury Department sanctions list for alleged links to the international heroin trade, which he denied.
Kremlev was elected in 2020 and has won support at the IBA to pay off millions of dollars in debt, although the IOC has raised further concerns about its financial dependence on Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom as a sponsor.
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