Presidium Meeting Addresses The Future
The WDSF Presidium met in Barcelona, Spain, for its usual Winter Presidium Meeting on January 23-25, 2016, extending the meeting by another half-day to provide extra time to thoroughly discuss and reach preliminary decisions on WDSF’s future administrative structure and operations.
The Presidium’s discussions included information and advice presented in studies commissioned by the WDSF Managing Committee a year ago in January 2015 to ensure WDSF’s appropriate legal compliance at its Legal Domicile in Switzerland and its branch office in Spain.
The members of the Presidium have studied the findings that professional advisors from the well-known international firm Deloitte’s presented in their report. In addition, the Presidium retained the services of the Lausanne-based law firm Kellerhals Carrard, who provided preliminary advice allowing the Presidium to better understand WDSF’s new global direction. In the end this will permit the Presidium to present a programme to the WDSF General Meeting to thoroughly address WDSF’s rapid expansion.
The objective of the work currently undertaken is to reinforce good governance in order to stick with the Olympic Agenda 2020 (the strategic roadmap for the future of the Olympic Movement).
The Presidium acknowledged that this is a demanding process that will absorb a lot of the time of the Presidium and some of its Commissions in the coming months, but the Presidium is strongly committed to follow the IOC’s recommendations. On the first day of these Presidium Meetings, longtime WDSF President and Presidium Member Carlos Freitag, 75, announced that he had decided to step down from office that day, thus ensuring continuity in this process beyond his remaining mandate.
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