International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach will get 225,000 euros a year to cover costs, the IOC said Thursday as it revealed details of payments to top officials for the first time.
The IOC called on other sporting federations to reveal payments to their leaders in a move that could put pressure on football’s governing body FIFA.
The ethics commission of the hugely wealthy Olympic body said in a statement it was making public details of proposed payments to its 102 active members and 35 honorary members “with a view to ensuring total transparency.”
The 14 executive board members, including the IOC’s four vice-presidents, will get $900 (830 euros) a day when they are meeting and travelling on official business.
Other IOC members will get meeting and travel allowances of $450 a day.
All IOC members will get an annual payment of $7,000 (6,470 euros). Their travel and accommodation costs are already paid by the IOC.
The IOC’s German president, a former Olympic fencing champion and now a successful lawyer, is considered to be on duty all year round however.
“The president will receive neither the fixed annual support nor the daily indemnity,” said the ethics commission.
“Instead of this, to cover some of the president’s personal costs related to the execution of his function, the ethics commission is fixing a single annual fixed amount linked to inflation of 225,000 euros ($243,800) as indemnity.”
— ‘Savings’ and ‘transparency’ —
The IOC said it was the first time a major sporting federation has released details of payments to its leaders. IOC members are volunteers and keep outside jobs if they have them.
With summer or winter Olympics earning vast revenues every two years, the IOC is a multi-billion dollar operation. Bach said in December that the organisation had signed more than $10 billion of television rights and sponsorship deals in 2014.
Ethics commission chairman Youssoupha Ndiaye said that announcing the payments policy “will lead to savings for the IOC and to transparency.”
Greater openness on decision-making and finances was one of the key items of Bach’s Agenda 2020 reforms passed by the IOC in December in a bid to maintain the stature of the Olympic Games.
“The IOC ethics commission invites all the sports organisations of the Olympic movement to establish a similar policy and make this public, in order to increase transparency within the sports movement,” said Ndiaye.
Football’s ruling body FIFA does not reveal any details of the financial package for its veteran president Sepp Blatter, who is expected to secure a new four-year term at an election in May.
FIFA earned 5.4 billion dollars over the past four years, the body’s finance director Markus Kattner told a FIFA executive meeting in Zurich last month. Over that time it paid $397 million in salaries to the staff, which by 2014 had increased to 474 employees.
But he added that details of payments to Blatter and other leaders would not be made public as FIFA is not a publicly quoted company.
At a press conference at the time, Blatter did not respond to a journalist’s question about whether he would ever give his salary figure.