Following the Salt Lake City bidding scandal, a new bid process was introduced — though corruption has remained a recurring topic around the Games. In 2000, Sydney was accused of having bribed two African IOC members during its bid. During the race for the 2008 Games, headlines emerged around French businessman André Guelfi, who allegedly sought to bribe IOC members to vote for Beijing over Paris, reportedly out of a personal grudge against French President Jacques Chirac.
Beijing immediately denied any wrongdoing, and even the French press struck a conciliatory tone — Paris's loss, most agreed, could not be put down to bribery of IOC members. Overall, having only an evaluation commission (rather than every IOC member) visit candidate cities was seen as making the process considerably harder to corrupt.
Even so, a corruption-free bid process for 2012 wasn't guaranteed either: Bulgaria's NOC president Ivan Slavkov was accused of offering to sell his vote for money. In comments to the BBC, he suggested other IOC members might also be willing to make their votes conditional on certain favors — a BBC investigation implied that votes among a significant number of the 124 IOC members for the 2012 host city could potentially be bought.
In response, the IOC suspended its Bulgarian member Ivan Slavkov and placed four well-known lobbyists on its list of undesirable persons.
