Olympic Bid Racked By Further Sacking

In the face of allegations of nepotism, the state official charged with organizing Leipzig's bid for the 2012 Olympics has been forced to take early retirement. Saxon's premier, Georg Milbradt, said State Secretary Wolfram Köhler would no longer be able to dedicate his energies to the bid due to contentions about him. Köhler has come under fire for allegedly paying his wife high commissions for helping to find financial sponsors while he was the mayor of the town of Riesa. Köhler is considered to be the source of the idea to bring the Games to Leipzig and Rostock, which has been racked by scandals for weeks. Both the head of Leipzig's Olympic bid committee and the chairman of Rostock's publicly-run Olympic marketing committee resigned on October over allegations of involvement with the former East German secret police and complicity in a number of financial irregularities.