Fabio Maldonado appeal to WMMAA against the decision in Fedor fightWMMAA received an appeal request from Stefano Sartori
Fabio Maldonado appeal to WMMAA against the decision in Fedor fightWMMAA received an appeal request from Stefano Sartori who is Brazilian Fabio Maldonado's manager. In his appeal mister Sartori asks to appoint an independent judges' commission that would reassess the results of the bout between Fedor Emelianenko and Fabio Maldonado.
Since all the rights belong to the organizing party of the event, Fight Nights promotion, any reassessment would be made possible if triggered by the promotion in question. However, based on the received appeal, WMMAA's overall responsibility for positive cooperation within sports community and because the whole issue brought up a lot of negative publicity towards judges of Russian MMA Union which is part of WMMAA, the Association is forced to react and assess both the situation occurred as well as the quality of decisions made by its licensed judges.
Source WMMAA.org:
"Hello.
I am Stefano Sartori, manager of Brazilian MMA fighter Fabio Maldonado and we are writing this email to officially appeal about the result of my client fight against Fedor Emilianenko in June 17 on the Main Event of Fight Nights 50. We watched the tape many times with cool head and we realized there is no way we lost the fight. It's either draw or Fabio's victory. We won R1 with a clear 10-8, not to mention that everyone else in the world besides Official Referee would have stopped that fight. Fedor was tough and came back to won the R2 10-9. The last one is really close and could go either way. So it's either Fabio's victory or a draw. We were extremely surprised to have learned that all the judges of the bout were Russian and they all are employed by non other than Fedor Emelianenko who is the president of Russian MMA Union that sanctioned these judges. Even worse, Radmir Gabdullin who was the head judge of the bout is the Russian MMA Union's vice-president. You can see it here http://unionmma.ru/structure/ If it is not a clear case of conflict of interest, I don't know what to call this. To have a fair judgement of this fight it is required to have independent international judges and that is what we claim with this official letter. Since mister Gabdullin said to the Russian Press that he would refuse to accept our appeal and considering that we feel that Russian judges would be under too much pressure on this case, we have no other choice but to appeal to World MMA Association that is an umbrella organization with Russian MMA union being part of it. Before finishing I want to say that I truly believe that Russian MMA Judges haven't done anything to intentionally harm my client. The conflict of interest, to my eyes, is natural when you judge someone who is personally so close to you. That's why we respectfully ask for another referee team to watch and judge this fight.
Stefano Sartori"