08/09/2026
To the German Chess Federation; to Mr Wadim Rosenstein
An open letter on transparency and the rules
Mr Rosenstein writes in his public statement that "there must be a limit," and that elections should not be decided by removing opponents. The federations deserve to know what his post leaves out.
It was Mr Rosenstein who tried to remove his opponent. On 11 August, he filed a formal complaint demanding my immediate disqualification from this election. On 5 September, the Electoral Commission rejected it in full and confirmed our ticket's place on the ballot. His post omits this entirely. A candidate who spent the summer demanding his opponent's exclusion cannot present himself as the defender of electoral competition.
The offence we have brought to the attention of the FIDE commissions is specific, and it is written in FIDE's own rules. Article 9 of the FIDE Electoral Rules prohibits a candidate from providing any advantage of more than nominal value to a Member Federation during the electoral period. A candidate who concludes one of the largest sponsorship contracts in a voting federation's history, in the middle of the campaign, could have provided exactly such an advantage. No secret bargain needs to be proven — the rule prohibits the benefit itself. And in this case the conflict is complete: Mr Rosenstein is also the DSB's FIDE Delegate — the person who holds Germany's vote in the very election in which he stands.
The sponsorship case was not dismissed. Nothing was decided in Mr Rosenstein's favour. The Commission referred the case to the FIDE Ethics & Disciplinary Commission — the body that in 2018, on weaker facts, found a national federation and its delegate guilty over a sponsorship connected to electoral arrangements and suspended that federation from the presidential vote, deciding the case before the Congress voted.
We will pursue the same timetable.
And the record so far is the opposite of transparency. According to their initial statement, the DSB concluded the contract on 19 August, five weeks before the election. After our complaint, the timeline has changed. Now they claim that Mr Rosenstein and the DSB signed this contract months ago — and disclosed it to no one: not in May, when the DSB appointed him its Delegate; not in July, when it nominated his ticket. This timeline has changed with every retelling — each version pushing the signing date further back — and not a single document confirms it. Their formal response to the Commission states no signing date and attaches no documents — not the contract, not the approval resolution, not the metadata that confirms the timeline.
In their formal response, Mr Rosenstein and the DSB state that this entire matter "could have been easily resolved if Mr Turlov had inquired before initiating the proceedings." Yet even after the proceedings began — when every reason existed to put the matter to rest — they provided nothing. Very well: we are inquiring now, publicly, so that every federation can see both the question and the answer. Surely, the biggest sponsorship contract in the DSB’s history has some compliance footprint, such as minuted approval by the federation’s Presidium. We invite Mr Rosenstein and the German Chess Federation to publish, by 9 September: the signed contract with its date, the Presidium resolution approving it, the date negotiations began, and the metadata confirming the timeline. These documents already exist; publishing them requires an hour, not a week. If they are not published, we will ask the Ethics & Disciplinary Commission to order their production and to decide the case before Samarkand, as it did in 2018.
A candidate who invokes the rules must be prepared to show he followed them. The federations should cast their votes knowing the facts — all of them.
Timur Turlov
