Lord Coe aide Nick Davies among three banned over alleged IAAF bribe
Lord Coe's closest aide has been provisionally banned over allegations he took money to bury news of positive Russian drugs tests in 2013.
The ethics board at world athletics' governing body the IAAF has suspended deputy director general Nick Davies, his wife Jane Boulter-Davies and medical manager Pierre-Yves Garnier for 180 days from June 10.
The allegations stem from an email sent by Davies to the son of Lamine Diack - whom Coe succeeded as IAAF president last August - before the 2013 World Athletics Championships in Moscow which outlined a plan to delay naming Russian cheats to avoid bad publicity.
In the email to Papa Massata Diack, a marketing consultant, Davies suggested a "very secret" five-point plan to manage media reaction to doping positives.
The IAAF ethics board has found "prima facie" cases that Davies, Boulter-Davies and Garnier received "undisclosed cash payments" from Papa Massata Diack in 2013 which were intended to have "any manipulative effect" and that they may have "misled" an IAAF ethics board investigator about them.
Both Diacks, the IAAF's former treasurer and Russian athletics chief Valentin Balakhnichev, former IAAF anti-doping boss Gabriel Dolle and Lamine Diack's legal adviser Habib Cisse have already been suspended for their part in the wider Russian doping scandal, which is also the subject of a French criminal investigation.
Davies, whom Coe promoted to run the IAAF office in Monaco after his election as president, stepped down when the BBC and Le Monde first revealed his 2013 email last December. He has denied any wrongdoing.