Curious. Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah was elected on Sunday March 3 in Bangkok for an eighth consecutive term as president of the Association of Asian Olympic Committees (OCA). The Kuwaiti leader was alone in the running for his own succession. He was unanimously re-elected at the organization's general assembly in the Thai capital. In itself, nothing very unexpected. But Sheikh Ahmad is currently the subject of an investigation by Swiss justice into an alleged political conspiracy in Kuwait. An investigation which led him, at the end of last year, to temporarily withdraw from the presidency of the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC). During the same general assembly, the Japanese Tsunekazu Takeda was reappointed for a new term as vice-president of the OCA. But he too is the subject of an investigation, carried out by the French justice system, on suspicion of corruption in the awarding of the Summer Games to Tokyo in 2020. Obviously, these two cases do not seem to bother the elected representatives of the Asian Olympic movement. The OCA specifies in a press release that its ethics commission looked into the Sheikh Ahmad and Takeda files, but without finding any reason to prevent them from serving a new mandate. Both men benefit from the “ presumption of innocence"
— Published March 4, 2019
