The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has fully upheld the three-year suspension imposed on Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The appeal lodged by the long-standing and now former Kuwaiti IOC member against the IOC Executive Board's decision of July 2023 has been dismissed. Three years ago, while still under suspension, Ahmad had influenced the presidential election of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) in favour of his brother Sheikh Talal Fahad Al-Hamad Al-Sabah.
The award makes public for the first time that, in parallel to the CAS proceedings, Ahmad had filed another civil action before a Swiss court. In Ahmad's decades-long, gigantic chronicle of misconduct, ethics entanglements and court rulings, this is yet another aperçu. The Cour d'appel civile du Tribunal cantonal vaudois confirmed the stay of these Lausanne parallel proceedings. The award CAS 2023/A/9931, which was not accompanied by any press release but recently surfaced in the incomplete list of decisions, is the only publicly accessible source for this matter.
The Lausanne suit is more than a procedural footnote. By opening the action before the Tribunal d'arrondissement de Lausanne on the very day he completed his CAS appeal, Ahmad set up a two-track strategy: the CAS filing presented as a mere precaution to preserve deadlines, the Swiss civil court framed as the proper forum to litigate the substance — and, in the meantime, to stretch the proceedings out for as long as possible. The award is yet another illustration of a pattern long visible across Ahmad's other cases, in Geneva and beyond: drag the proceedings out until their contours dissolve.
The Lausanne courts did not play along. They stayed the action on 29 September 2023, maintained the stay on 16 November 2023, and were confirmed on appeal by the Cour d'appel civile du Tribunal cantonal vaudois on 18 March 2024 — three rulings, none of them previously reported. Had the strategy succeeded, the architecture of sports arbitration would have come under real strain in a high-profile case: an IOC member would have escaped the CAS, the very forum to which IOC membership commits him, by re-routing his dispute through the Swiss civil courts.
That is precisely the conduct the panel rebukes when it tells Ahmad that he cannot "simultaneously approbate and reprobate" the jurisdiction of the tribunal he himself seized.
