The spectacular events surrounding the Australian Olympic Committee presidential election have finally ended, four months after John Coates was returned to his perch.

Former AOC media director, Mike Tancred, who admitted to threatening to "bury" his one-time boss, Fiona de Jong, has been judged, twice, not to be a bully. He was merely reprimanded for "disreputable conduct" and then given a redundancy payment rumoured to be half a million dollars.

The "no bully" judgment was made because his behaviour towards de Jong was "not repetitive conduct".

The other complaints of bullying against him (which were heard by a panel of former judges in a separate, confidential inquiry) were also not upheld, despite one complainant having accused him of threats to kill, and another of harassing her after she miscarried her baby and took two days off at the Beijing Olympics.

That judgment was released about 4pm on a Friday afternoon three weeks ago – the traditional time for companies to drop newsworthy statements they might find embarrassing. It's called "taking out the trash".

Finally, on Thursday this week, the AOC put out another statement announcing Tancred was taking a redundancy. President John Coates thanked him "for 18 years of loyal service".

He had been "caught in the crossfire" of an election campaign, it was said; the victim of political machinations. Stories of his bad behaviour had been given "undue emphasis" by the heat of the campaign.

(Except that each of the alleged bullying complaints was made well in advance of the election campaign beginning.)

The latest statement was also factually wrong. It said that nothing alleged against Tancred, "separately or taken cumulatively", amounted to bullying "or other breach of the AOC's by-laws or policy" – a direct contradiction of the AOC's own statement of May. The latest statement was later corrected.

Tancred tells Fairfax Media he will now retire to a beach, where he is "looking forward to playing golf, riding bikes and swimming with the sharks, not working with them".

But what of Australia's premier sports organisation?

Well, it appears that the cleansing winds that John Coates offered as part of winning the election have fallen still. 

Reading the "culture review" he commissioned from The Ethics Centre is instructive. It found that a minority of staff members felt the AOC was living by its core values - mateship, excellence, resilience and leadership.

The only core value they felt it consistently exhibited was "pride", and that "an overblown sense of pride ... could, at times, mutate into 'arrogance'." 

The "shadow values" – the rules the AOC really lived by – included patronage, power, status and tradition and conservatism, the Ethics Centre found.

"Senior leaders in the organisation are seen to be exemplars of the shadow values" and it was "widely felt that power is pursued and defended for its own sake".

The "politics of patronage" was identified as "a dominant leadership and decision-making model", and many said: "people get rewarded for bad behaviour here".

"The President is perceived to exercise overriding influence or control over the AOC," the report found - unsurprisingly after 27 years in the top job.

Asked about the report at its release, Coates said: "I'm the president, not the senior leader being criticised".

Perhaps, in light of everything that's happened, Coates should pay heed for the remainder of his term to The Ethics Centre's definition of leadership. That involves "authenticity and self-awareness".