The AIBA has responded to Monday’s column by WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman, claiming Sulaiman or his WBC associates forged an AIBA document and purposely omitted two paragraphs to mislead the boxing public.

AIBA deplores and refutes in the strongest terms the comments by WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman on 10 July 2017 on his boxing blog. In it, Mr Sulaiman refers to a letter from AIBA to its member National Federations which he reproduces in Spanish. At no point has AIBA written such a letter in Spanish, nor would AIBA ever send an unsigned communication to its members, meaning that Mr Sulaiman or his associates have illegally created a forgery and attributed it to AIBA. By also failing to include two paragraphs sent in the original letter (attached), Mr Sulaiman’s sole motivation to misinform the boxing public is abundantly clear.

Sadly, these ongoing attacks, particularly at a time when AIBA is in the midst of its Year of Africa Legacy Project to support and help African boxing realise its full potential and the upscaling of its World Championships to be greater in scope and reach than ever, merely epitomise Mr Sulaiman’s and his organisation’s lack of understanding in how genuine grassroots projects can make a real difference and outdated terms like ‘amateur’ are no longer valid.

AIBA considers it an enormous shame that the WBC has been left so insecure that it has had to resort to spreading misinformation, and AIBA would far rather be working with fellow organisations to collectively move boxing forward than responding to this kind of ill-advised and poorly considered attacks which do not serve the interests of the boxers, our guiding principle.

We would encourage the public to read AIBA’s original letter and make their own analysis of what we consider to be a slanderous attempt to forge official documentation and the misrepresentation of our organisation.