Olympic investigation launched after sponsor tickets sold to public
Olympic organisers have launched an investigation after claims that tickets for sponsors have been sold to the public at hiked up prices.
London 2012 and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are to contact authorised tickets reseller (ATR) after the BBC discovered some seats were being sold for 20% more than their face value.
It is a breach of IOC rules.
The tickets, some appearing to have been linked to sponsors including Dow Chemical, Acer and GE, were being handled by separate agency CoSport, according to the BBC.
Sweden, Norway, the USA, Australia and Brazil are among the National Olympic Committees which use CoSport as an authorised ticket reseller.
CoSport’s sister company Jet Set Sports provides hospitality programmes for a number of sponsors.
In the past hundreds of Britons have bought tickets from CoSport, taking advantage of EU laws which allows them to buy from the allocations given to other European countries.
The arrival of the tickets from CoSport this week showed that many of them had been promised to sponsors, rather than any individual countries, it was suggested.
They even had the name of the sponsors stamped on them, it was claimed.
Foreign re-sellers are permitted to charge 20% more than the face value of London 2012 tickets, but are not allowed to sell any tickets which had been set aside for sponsors.
This is about 700,000 tickets.
There is no suggestion of the sponsors being involved in any wrongdoing.
A London 2012 spokesman said: “Locog (the London 2012 organisers) and IOC has made it very clear we will take action if any ATR is in breach of the rules.
“We will contact CoSport and Jet Set to find out why the tickets they have been allocated have been distributed in this way.”
