Laudatio zur Verleihung der Verschlossenen Auster 2008

Austerpreisträger: das Internationale Olympische Komitee (IOC)
Laudator: Andrew Jennings, investigativer Journalist

Good afternoon. It’s a genuine pleasure to be here – and in daylight! I have spent so much of the last 40 years in dark places researching dark people that it’s good to be surrounded by people like you – like me – who dig to discover truths – and are not frightened by good honest sunshine!

We spend years in the dark labyrinths digging, we satisfy our media lawyers, we believe our revelations should be widely known because we work for the people and we want to help them to be knowledgeable before they vote in elections. We don’t tell them how to vote – we tell them about the people and the policies they are being offered. We only want a healthy, honest, open society.

Today we are making two Closed Oyster awards – one to a man and another to his organisation. Both pass all the tests required to receive this honour. Their behaviour has been offensive to reporters who seek only to tell the truth to the public.

For a writer and TV presenter like me there is a daily challenge: How can we get the public interested in our research, to pay attention to the important information we are disclosing?

They say, the truth will set us free. I hope it can also, sometimes, make us laugh.

Our winners today are also – sometimes – buffoons. But how to tell this?

IT’S BEEN A HARD journey here from my home hidden in the hills of the North of England, surrounded by shepherds with shotguns – suspicious of all strangers, especially if they look like gangsters and are asking directions to find my farm.

When I arrived at Manchester airport yesterday there was an urgent message waiting at the check-in. Call Germany, it’s very important! I did and a familiar voice whispered: “On Saturday, you must not make jokes. We Germans are serious people – we don’t laugh on formal occasions like this.”

Oh dear.
I’d written these words – you must always write presentations in advance because the bad guys may have a lawyer hidden among the friendly faces.

And I had emailed it to Germany for translation. I’d heard nothing back. Nothing bad . . . Nothing good.

Can you people at the back please lock the doors so nobody can leave. If you don’t like what you are going to hear, you can ask for your money back later.

Before we begin to identify this year’s winners I have been asked by the organising committee to make an important public service announcement.

There is a criminal in the room. He was found guilty of a crime and given a jail sentence.

Will everybody please check that their laptops, cell phones, wallets and purses are safe.
Good. From up here I can see where you are hiding your money.
I’m the criminal and I got my criminal record back in 1994 when both of today’s winner’s went to a Swiss court and told lies about me. So you’ll understand why it brings me such pleasure to be making this award today.

The first of our two winners today is a German citizen. The last time I saw this man was in June 1999 and he had his arms around another man in a passionate embrace. It was in the crowded lobby of the National Arts Centre in Seoul, Korea at a prestigious international reception.

The other man was a billionaire, the biggest logger of the world’s rainforests, a criminal, a payer and taker of bribes and best friend of one of the world’s most murderous dictators. He had been accused of the ethnic cleansing of two and half million Dayak people in the Borneo forests who lived in the path of his bulldozers and chainsaws.

You’ll have guessed already that this wicked man, Indonesian Bob Hasan, was a member of the International Olympic Committee. Today’s winner, and his friend the evil Bob Hasan, were brought together by a third man, also small in physique but big in ego and ambition.

(SLIDE 2 Young Samaranch-blazing torches)

Here is that third man, he is second from left, the sharp-faced young man, impeccably clothed in fascist uniform, marching through Barcelona in 1954.

In this picture we see a bunch of thugs parading through the streets, intimidating the citizens. Note the flaming torches. If that photograph was taken today, the smart uniforms and blue shirts would be replaced by blue and white track suits and sunglasses.

Watch that right arm. Its going to get more muscular over the next 20 years as he moves t0 take control of the second winner of our illustrious prize today and becomes mentor to our first winner, a lawyer from Würzburg.

He is a member of a team who won a gold medal in the sport of fencing in Montreal in 1976 and later was talent-spotted by a man who knew how to pay bribes.

Horst Dassler, of the family who owned Adidas, hired our champion to work on what investigative reporters call ‘the dirty tricks team’ but Thomas Bach …….

(SLIDE 3 Bach laughing picture)

…… – yes, you guessed it was him – called the good will team for international promotions.

Herr Bach stayed sparkling clean as all around him his colleagues were fixing elections and paying bribes to put sports leaders – who would sign contracts with Adidas – in power at the international sports federations.

For Herr Bach it was the beginning of becoming friends with the crooks who were taking control of our sports. The Adidas fixers also worked for Horst Dassler’s other company, International Sport & Leisure, that traded in marketing and television rights and were paying vast bribes to sports leaders to acquire the exclusive contracts for the football world Cup, athletics world championships . . . and the Olympic Games.

The man who sold the Olympics to Dassler and his apostle Thomas Bach was the man who was addicted to the peculiar and loathsome sport of the Right Arm Exercise.

(SLIDE 4 Samaranch right arm)

Here is Juan Antonio Samaranch in 1974, fourth from right, aged 54, giving the fascist salute in Barcelona. It’s 1974. He was then Civil Governor and it was in that year that the last ant-franquista was garroted, slowly, in the courtyard of the city’s jail.

Six years later Dassler fixed the election, Thomas Bach applauded from the sidelines and Samaranch became President of the International Olympic Committee who today, I am pleased to announce, share the Closed Oyster prize with Herr Bach.

Publishing a book in 1992 revealing that Samaranch was a 37-year career fascist got me dragged to the Lausanne court. Samaranch denied ever being political, provided a book to the court from which the pictures of him in Right Arm Clothing had been removed and I got a five-day suspended sentence. For a journalist, it’s badge of honour – and today I give them one back.

The IOC has become famous for bribery and corruption as has the ISL company. In the criminal court in Zug this spring I have been sitting with Jens Weinreich listening to the evidence revealing that ISL paid more than 150 million Swiss Francs in bribes to sports leaders.

Thank God, Herr Bach was never aware of this bribery when he worked for Dassler or since he joined the corrupt IOC in 1991 and rubbed shoulders with corrupt people like Joao Havelange and Sepp Blatter. And thank God those bad boys at the Siemens company didn’t tell their friend Thomas Bach about their dirty games.

Let’s spend a brief moment reminding ourselves about the fine fellows – and their few token women – at the IOC – and why they are such suitable candidates for the Closed Oyster Award in this Olympic year.

The first great achievement of the Right Arm Exerciser at the first Olympics where he had total control – that was in Moscow 1980 – was the absence of any positive drugs test.
I didn’t say – the absence of doping.

Samaranch became the friend of dopers everywhere – why has the IOC had to wait so long for this award? – when he suppressed positive tests at the next Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984.

The noise out there on the street is of big trucks returning tonnes of medals won by dopers at IOC events – the legacy of Samaranch’s refusing to fight a war against doping. And never forget, the IOC didn’t catch them. The public authorities, cops, customs officers and FBI agents caught them.

The suppression of positive dope tests by the IOC was because their sponsors – or Partners as we are told to call them – wanted to fund a clean event. So it was made clean.

Today the Olympic Games are a willing platform for the purveyors of sugary drinks that rot our children’s teeth and of crap burgers that make them obese. Meanwhile, Thomas Bach can travel first class and stay in the world’s most luxurious hotels. His addictive drug is power, wealth and political influence.

The old Right Arm Waver handpicked Jacques Rogge to follow him, the man with beautiful teeth, lovely hair and a complete inability to undo the wickedness of Samaranch’s happy corporate relationship with the butchers of Tiananmen Square.

Now Rogge has announced a Youth Olympics. It is going to be so much easier for the dope chemists to find new guinea pigs to test their drugs on. Teenage dopers. Thanks Herr Bach, thanks IOC. Have a Closed Oyster.

But President Rogge has already betrayed our children.

In 2006 Rogge went to a press conference boosting one of his Partners and announced, ‘McDonald’s has supported the Olympic Movement for more than 30 years now . . . and we share many of the same ideals.’

I’d never thought of McDonalds and idealism in the same breath, never mind the same universe. Then you realise – McDonalds and the IOC are jointly worthy of today’s prize.

At the Opening Ceremony in Beijing will be these people who damage children. Next to them will be sitting their friends who destroy children.

Look out for Wall Street Master of the Universe Mr Jeff Immelt. He sponsors the IOC twice. Firstly through his vast conglomerate General Electric and again through its subsidiary television company NBC.

They can afford to sponsor the Olympic brand because GE Money has made a killing out of sub-prime mortgages.

In public Jeff has to support a bizarre concept, invented by Samaranch when he was the first fascist to crave a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s called the Olympic Truce. It doesn’t happen and it can’t happen but the IOC wastes money on stupid ‘Peace’ conferences and persuading the UN to pass pointless resolutions. You’ve probably never heard of it.

In private, Jeff may be unhappy about this nonsense. GE makes the engines for many of the warplanes doing the killing in Iraq; a truce during the Games would be bad for business.

Imagine telling George Bush that in August he can’t bomb anybody for two weeks.

Today we honour Herr Bach and his IOC friends who are working so hard with the media censors of Beijing to deny Chinese people and athletes from other countries the right to free speech.

When the IOC were in deep in sleaze eight years ago after the Salt Lake City cash-and-sex-for-votes scandal – which of course Herr Bach knew nothing about – their media massagers Hill & Knowlton came up with the desperate, meaningless slogan, ‘Celebrate Humanity.’

Last week in Athens a reporter asked IOC mouthpiece Giselle Davies if it was OK for athletes to wear wristbands with this slogan in Beijing.

She didn’t have an answer.

Closed Oysters to the IOC and the man who so typifies them, Thomas Bach who some people say should be their next President. He is certainly qualified.

(Repeat – SLIDE 3 Bach laughing picture)