The Rio police have conducted a press conference in the past few minutes in which they say they have seen emails between Pat Hickey and Marcus Evans discussing the sale of tickets at the Rio Olympics.
THG, a sports hospitality group owned by Ipswich Town chairman Evans, had been the authorised ticket reseller for OCI allocated tickets at both the 2012 London Olympics and the Sochi winter games in 2014.
The OCI wished to continue this arrangement for the Rio games. However, the Rio authorities rejected THG's application to act as a ticket reseller for these games.
The OCI then signed a deal with Lucan based company Pro 10 to act as their ticket reseller for these games. Interestingly for League of Ireland boffins, one of Pro 10's directors is the former St. Pat's manager Eamonn Collins.
On 5 August, THG executive Kevin Mallon was arrested in a Rio hotel. Police say they caught him 'red handed' touting tickets. The tickets which were supposedly being touted were all IOC allocated tickets. Price gouging on tickets is a criminal offence in Brazil.
At the time, the OCI said they would commence "an immediate investigation with our ATR (authorised ticket reseller), Pro10, into how the individuals were allegedly in possession of OCI allocated tickets"
However, the Brazilian police assert that Pro 10 merely functioned as a 'bridge' to siphon IOC allocated tickets to THG. Police assert that the OCI facilitated this transfer of tickets through Pro10 to THG.
Police in Rio say their investigation has uncovered that the OCI facilitated tickets to reach THG by transfer through Pro10 #rio2016
— Sinead O'Carroll (@SineadOCarroll) August 23, 2016
Now, they say they have seen an email exchange dating from as recently as August 3rd, in which Pat Hickey and the head of THG Marcus Evans are discussing ticket sales.
Police say the pair's weekly email exchange stretches back to 2010.
Police claim that they have seen emails between Marcus Evans (THG) and Pat Hickey which discussed sale of Olympic tickets #rio2016
— Sinead O'Carroll (@SineadOCarroll) August 23, 2016
Weekly mails between Marcus Evans and Pat Hickey date back to 2010, Rio police say. Also say there was exchange on 3 August before Olympics
— Sinead O'Carroll (@SineadOCarroll) August 23, 2016
According to the authorities, Pat Hickey originally told police he hadn't contacted Marcus Evans since 2012 and that he only contacted him again after Mallon was arrested to complain that his name was being sullied.
However, Brazilian police say their evidence of the email exchange flatly contradicts this.
The transcript of the conversation appears to show Pat Hickey offering all of the OCI's allocation of tickets to the Rio opening ceremony to THG.
Transcript of conversation between Pat Hickey and Marcus Evans pic.twitter.com/vmfVZuogBI
— Ewan MacKenna (@EwanMacKenna) August 23, 2016
The press conference also touched in the matter of the other three OCI members who had their passports seized and who were due to talk to police this evening - Kevin Kilty, Stephen Martin and Dermot Henihan.
Only Henihan showed up and he's been told he's free to leave Brazil. A judge has ordered the return of his passport.
The other two are to appear before police on Thursday.
Here's Pat Hickey talking about why the OCI decided to use THG as if the official ticket reseller for the London games
Yesterday, Grainne Adams, the mother of Irish sailor Finn Lynch, spoke to Newstalk Breakfast about her attempts to buy Olympics tickets from the OCI's official ticket reseller for the games, Pro10.
Adams, who as a parent of a competitor should have been entitled to a ticket, told Newstalk Breakfast that her attempts to procure tickets through that channel proved futile. She ultimately had to buy tickets to the Olympics opening ceremony from a Norwegian website.
I worked out that it was Pro10, I rang and rang and rang every day, several times a day, you'd just get straight through as if to voicemail and then it would say that voicemail was full.
I was getting a bit desperate. I googled Pro10 a lot and found some person's name with a phone number.
I phoned them, said this is the trouble I'm having. The person I rang didn't have anything to do with the tickets or the Olympics, but he said let them know and they would get back to me. Which they did the next day and said that all of Ireland's tickets had sold out in January, they had a few tickets left for the athletics.
What I was looking for were tickets to the opening ceremony because sailing isn't the easiest sport to watch from the land. I had my heart set on watching Finn walking with the Irish team under the Irish flag.
H-T: The Journal
