But the Supreme Court reversed the Sandiganbayan’s decision, saying there was no legal basis to compel Campomanes to make an accounting to the Commission on Audit (COA).>

Here are some of the "best" parts of articles about Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.

<And then there is the danger of alien abduction. He has already been pressganged into one trip on a UFO - seven years ago when he was on a business trip to Moscow. "They took me from my apartment and we went aboard their ship," he says, sitting in his office in Kalmykia's capital, Elista. "We flew to some kind of star. They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist."> On top of this Kirsan believes in angels, mind reading, parapsychology, etc. Clearly, a patient in a mental hospital is a better place for him than President of FIDE (, not to mention President of Kalmykia).

While Kalmykia is one of the poorest regions in Russia, Kirsan lives in a luxury haouse and owns several Rolls-Royces. <He once campaigned in a 9m-long Lincoln saloon under the slogan "a wealthy president is a safeguard against corruption".> <On becoming its leader, Ilyumzhinov - who was the country's chess champion at 15 - abolished its parliament and installed an authoritarian regime, promising to introduce "economic dictatorship".> Big part of poor Kalmykia's tax moneys obviously goes to Kirsan's pockets.

<Chess City - the $50m complex that he built on the edge of his sleepy capital - turned out to be a white elephant of Millennium Dome proportions: its foundations are subsiding and few of its luxury homes are inhabited. The match this week could not be held there because although the complex has a swimming pool, a hotel and a grocery store, it does not have a hall large enough for a big chess match. > <In 1993 he met the pope who told him to help the Catholic church in his country. When Ilyumzhinov returned he discovered there was exactly one Catholic person in Kalmykia. Nevertheless he built a Catholic cathedral in Kalmykia.> Some examples of how Kirsan uses money. Probably, one of top performances of how to spend other peoples money stupidly in whole world history. Surely, Kirsan is not a good choice to decide about FIDE money.

then billions of people in the world belong in mental hospitals, too. 60% of Icelanders believe in faeries, according to my Let's Go: Europe 1998. As for alien abductions -- SOMETHING is happening to these people. There are enough real reasons to slag on Ilyumzhinov.

On February 5, 2003, the Philippine anti-graft court Sandiganbayan convicted Florencio Campomanes, the former FIDE president, for failure to account for the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) government funds amounting to PhP12.876 million (or US$238,746 at an exchange rate of PhP53.932=$1). The PSC entrusted these funds to the FIDE for the World Chess Olympiad in Manila, hosted by the Philippine government from June 6 to 25, 1992. Subsequently, Florencio Campomanes was sentenced to one year and 10 months imprisonment. According to a FIDE Press Release, dated 1/16/2007, Campomanes was cleared of these charges by the Philippine Supreme Court in December, 2006, though FIDE's release states that the penalty was the equivalent of a 100 euro fine.

Campomanes' charges were overturned based upon a technicality. There was never any resolution about what happened to the 12.876 million pesos mentioned in the above paragraph. The rationale for the overturn was that the Supreme Court of the Philippines decided that Campomanes was not a government official to whom the anti-graft laws applied. Thus as a non-government official, Campomanes had no duty under the law he was prosecuted to render an accounting of the 12.876 million pesos:

first time i know about these charges when i google his name, but he was cleared by the supremem court.