A statement said: ‘In December 2015, the national financial parquet (PNF) was informed of two financial movements which intervened in the months of July and October 2013, totalling 2.8 million Singapore dollars, under the title “Tokyo 2020 Olympic Game Bid” from an account at a Japanese bank for the benefit of society “Black Tidings” in Singapore’.
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“We will further work to confirm facts”, top Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters, citing the French investigation.
However, Suga and Endo both said they were confident that no wrongdoing occurred, based on previous declarations by officials.
French prosecutors said on Thursday that they had launched an investigation into the payments linked to Tokyo’s successful bid for the 2020 Olympics to an account linked to Papa Massata Diack who was an IAAF adviser.
The payment is being investigated by French prosecutors, while the Japanese government is also looking into it.
The transactions under suspicion allegedly were made by the bid team, or those acting on its behalf, directly to a secret bank account in Singapore linked to Diack’s son, Papa Massata Diack, the newspaper reported.
According to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) independent commission, the company is owned by an Ian Tan Tong Han, and the account is linked to Papa Massata Diack, son of disgraced athletics supremo Lamine Diack.
The discovery was made as part of a separate French case looking into allegations of corruption and money laundering linked to a cover-up of Russian athletes’ doping by global sports officials, prosecutors said in an e-mailed statement.
The payment was suspected of having been made during the Olympic bidding process in 2013, shortly before Tokyo defeated the other candidate cities – Istanbul and Madrid – according to an investigation by the Guardian. He was also an honorary International Olympic Committee member in 2014 but resigned as IAAF president amid allegations that he had accepted more than $1.13 million in bribes to cover up Russian doping tests.
Lamine Diack now faces corruption and money laundering charges in France.
A business profile of Black Tidings lodged with Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority shows the company as a sole proprietorship registered in 2006.
It said three financial investigators were leading the probe for corruption, aggravated money laundering, fraud and conspiracy surrounding the 2020 bidding.
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The former president of the Tokyo bid committee, Tsunekazu Takeda, and its former director general, Nobumoto Higuchi, broke their silence to admit the payments had been made in two tranches, either side of its victory, but insisted the campaign was “at all times fair and correct”. “We believe that the Games were awarded to Tokyo because the city presented the best bid”.
