RUSADA has “no control” over Moscow Laboratory data, says acting head Bukhanov

From Inside the Games

The Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) has insisted it has no jurisdiction over the Moscow Laboratory data that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has charged it with investigating.

One of the key orders of the CAS decision announced last week – in which the four-year period of sanctions proposed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) as punishment for the manipulation of the data was halved – involved RUSADA conducting investigations into “any cases impacted by the deletions and/or alterations of the Moscow Laboratory data.”

RUSADA was required to do “everything possible to locate the complete and authentic data from the Moscow Laboratory relating to those cases, so as to rectify in full the tampering that has impacted those cases.”

But RUSADA’s acting director general Mikhail Bukhanov, has told insidethegames: “Our point of view has not changed.

“And that’s why in the official statement we say that the agency is not fully satisfied with the decision of CAS.

“It is a fact – not disputed by WADA – that the database of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory was never under RUSADA’s control; neither was RUSADA involved in the data transfer process at the heart of the allegations.

“This is also not disputed by WADA.”

In its decision, published last Thursday (December 17), the CAS Panel “unanimously determined RUSADA to be non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code in connection with its failure to procure the delivery of the authentic LIMS data (Laboratory Information Management System) and underlying analytical data of the former Moscow Laboratory to WADA.

“As a consequence, the panel issued a number of orders which come into effect on December 17 2020 for a period of two years, i.e. until December 16 2022.”

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