American opts against French court appearance
The one year suspended sentence handed down to Floyd Landis in November of last year will stand after the former pro withdrew his appeal this morning. The hearing was due to be held in Versailles between today and Friday, but now won’t take place.
With the timeframe expired anyway, the appeal was largely a symbolic gesture.
Landis was given the suspended sentence last year by a court in Nanterre, France. This related to the hacking of the WADA-accredited lab of Chatenay-Malabry near Paris in 2006, the year when Landis won the Tour de France but then tested positive.
In defending himself after the charges of doping, he and his-then coach Arnie Baker used information from the laboratory. Prosecutors claimed that Landis and his coach Arnie Baker were involved in a plot to hack into the lab’s computer system, and that the information was obtained that way.
Baker was accused of having asked the consulting firm Kargus Consultants to break into the computer systems and to gain access to private documents. The hacker Alain Quiros, the alleged intermediary Jean-Francois Dominguez, a former paratrooper, and Thierry Lorho, who used to be an agent with the spy agency DGSE, were also on trial last year.
Of those, Quiros admitted hacking into the lab and was given a six-month prison sentence plus a fine of €4,000. He was also convicted of hacking into the computers of the environmental lobby group Greenpeace, with the intrusion being done on behalf of employees of the French power company Electricité de France SA (EdF). The state-controlled power company was fined €1.5 million.
At the time, Landis denied the claims, said that the information was posted to him anonymously, and chose not to attend the trial. He was consequently tried in abstentia, which is forbidden in several countries including, under its constitution, the USA, but which is permitted in France.