HON Circle Monarch Klaus Schormann visits Thomas Bach

Before Klaus Schormann and UIPM secretary general Shiny Fang are received by Thomas Bach in Lausanne on Thursday afternoon, a little more clarification is in order. Voilà!

Do you actually know what a HON president is?

No?

This neologism, which Schormann has recently started using within the UIPM, has two sources. Firstly, the English word honorary. There are a lot of honorary presidents in the so-called Olympic movement. There are also honorary members in the IOC. But none of the many dignitaries, many of whom are not at all honorable, spells their name as HON.

Klaus Schormann has the exclusive.

Let's not kid ourselves: he most likely copied it from Lufthansa and his beloved status as a HON Circle Member – the highest frequent flyer status of the crane airline, which in many respects is now only mediocre.

You may know that Lufthansa was a so-called ‘sponsor’ of Schormann's world governing body, the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne (UIPM), for many years. The federation and its athletes hardly benefited from this alleged sponsorship because a large part of Lufthansa's services (if not all of them) consisted of flying the UIPM monarch around the world. Several people familiar with the details of these Lufthansa contracts recently explained to me that basically only the president had access to these tickets. Schormann was and is crazy about first-class and business-class flights.

Perhaps that is why Lufthansa logos are occasionally still used at UIPM events, even though there has been no official sponsorship contract for an eternity?

At the last congress in 2022, however, Lufthansa reappeared in the list of ‘sponsors’ – without a sum and also without the equivalent of a billing amount, flight tickets as so-called value in kind.

Strange.

At the time, my colleague Jörg Winterfeldt had watched carefully and remarked:

Questions upon questions.

And yes, in case you are also asking yourself this: 

People with in-depth knowledge of practices in the Schormann monarchy claim that Lufthansa bigwigs have enjoyed the benefits of Olympic accreditation and upgrade cards. 

I recently described this in detail using the example of a strange UIPM ‘sponsor’ Kory Tarpenning, who as an athlete served a two-year doping ban for using anabolic steroids and as a ‘sponsor’ a three-month prison sentence for tax fraud:

The notorious practices of UIPM monarch Klaus Schormann (I): the trade in Olympic accreditation, disguised as sponsor contracts

Part I: Read the original of a so-called sponsor contract that Klaus Schormann, in violation of the UIPM statutes, signed on his own authority, with a strange consulting firm whose owner had just been convicted of tax fraud and went to prison shortly after the contract was signed.

THE INQUISITORJens Weinreich

Trading in Olympic accreditations and upgrade cards? What UIPM monarch Schormann claims to his fellow board members

Part III: Before we take a deeper look at further documents, contracts and machinations from the UIPM, let us briefly read an email in which monarch Klaus Schormann tries to explain certain events to his colleagues on the Executive Board – let us check whether his assertions are correct.

THE INQUISITORJens Weinreich

Welcome to the realm of Klaus Schormann!

You are now aware that the UIPM Congress is to be held under a variety of dubious circumstances in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, where a new president is to be elected after 31 years and the monarch Schormann is to be made honorary president. Oh, excuse me, HON President, of course, with an annual budget of a quarter of a million.

Ethics complaint against UIPM monarch Schormann for “acting corruptly” and improper influence on “the result of any UIPM election”

Part II: For months, an explosive ethics complaint has been filed against the UIPM president, which is receiving special treatment and being kept secret. This casts the strange events surrounding treasurer John Helmick in Paris in a new light and could have been an act of perfidious revenge.

THE INQUISITORJens Weinreich

In his remarkable ethics complaint against Klaus Schormann, the long-standing treasurer John Helmick claimed, among other things, that Schormann unduly influenced ‘the outcome of every UIPM’ election.

And, you see, the fact that Schormann is anticipating the ‘election result’ from Riyadh internally and referring to himself as the HON President is wonderfully supportive of Helmick's accusations.