Sheikh Ahmad of Kuwait LOSES appeal on conviction of forgery – but IOC power-broker and former ally of Thomas Bach will not serve jail time

Sheikh Ahmad of Kuwait, a longtime Olympic power broker, had his conviction for forgery was upheld on appeal, a Swiss court said, although he will serve no jail time for his part in a coup plot to implicate public rivals at home.

Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, his English former lawyer, a Kuwaiti assistant and a lawyer based in Geneva had their September 2021 convictions upheld on charges related to orchestrating a sham arbitration case a decade ago.

Another lawyer was acquitted on appeal.

“Ahmad al-Sabah acted with the aim of obtaining an unlawful advantage,” the Court of Appeal in the Canton (state) of Geneva ruled, and had financed the fraudulent trial with the intention of “restoring his reputation in Kuwait.”

The sheikh, a member of the International Olympic Committee since 1992 and a former close ally of President Thomas Bach, had been sentenced to nearly 14 months in prison with an additional 15 months suspended during his original trial.

The judges of the appeal court in Geneva changed that to a suspended sentence of two years with a probation period of three years.

Sheikh Ahmad has denied wrongdoing and may appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal in the IOC’s home city of Lausanne.

The 188-page ruling from Geneva was dated December 18, but was published by the court on Monday, days after Sheikh Ahmad lost a key position in frontline politics in Kuwait.

Formally he was replaced as defense minister of the oil-rich state last week.

Sheikh Ahmad was known as a “kingmaker” in the Olympic elections, including campaigning for Bach’s first presidential victory in 2013. He suspended himself as an IOC member after being indicted in Geneva more than five years ago.

The IOC did not formally suspend him after his first conviction in September 2021 – it did finally made last year when the sheik became involved in the presidential elections of the Olympic Council of Asia in an attempt to get his brother elected to succeed him.

The IOC said in a statement that its ethics committee, which has already suspended the sheikh until 2026, is “reviewing the situation following the Geneva verdict.”

The chic Swiss lakeside city is a global hub for commercial arbitration cases of the kind that Sheikh Ahmad is said to have forged in the case a decade ago.

In 2013, he presented video footage to Kuwaiti authorities showing a former prime minister, Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed al-Sabah, and a former parliament speaker, Jassim al-Kharafi, discussing a coup.

The two men could have been sentenced to death for treason, the appeals court noted.

Lawyers for Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed and the al-Kharafi family filed a criminal complaint in Geneva regarding the arbitration case. The arbitration, which was later ruled to be bogus, was then taken to the High Court in London as part of a trial aimed at verifying the videos.

Prosecutors said the sham legal dispute involved retroactive documents and a Delaware shell company that the defendants controlled.

Sheikh Ahmad was also a senior FIFA official from 2015 to 2017, until he withdrew his bid for re-election when federal prosecutors in Brooklyn implicated him in sending bribes to soccer officials. He denied wrongdoing and was not charged.