HALF of Hungary's Olympic swimming team, who won six medals in Atlanta including three gold, qualified for the Games on the basis of fictitious times at a meet that was never held.

Government officials yesterday confirmed newspaper reports of the scam and blamed the Hungarian Swimming Federation for submitting the fraudulent records.

Eleven of the 22-member Hungarian team had not met Olympic qualification times at national and regional meets, so a phantom meet was held on June 6-8 and imaginary times were entered.

"These swimmers were all capable of meeting the Olympic requirements," said Rezsoe Gallov, head of the government's national sports office. "The trouble was that the federation leaders were too lazy to keep proper records.

"This meet should have been held or at least a training session should have been called to meet the administrative requirements.

"Fraud is fraud and this was fraud. We and the Hungarian Olympic Committee oppose any such practice."

Lajos Babati, secretary of the HOC, said that the discovery of the fraud would not affect the Olympics results of the Hungarian team.

Tamas Gyarfas, the head of the Hungarian Swimming Federation, has resigned because of the scandal, but general secretary Jozsef Ruza refused to quit because he claimed that the International Swimming Federation (FINA) had been aware of the fraud.

However, an official from FINA's statistics office said that he did not know about the fraud, and had even found some swimmers' results suspiciously good.

Cornel Marculescu, the head of FINA, also denied that his organisation knew - or had approved of - the scam.

"We don't have police around the world to check up on national committees," he explained.

The Hungarian Olympic Committee claim that only swimming and athletics results are susceptible to fraud. They say they will only consider supervision of further swimming results if the federations themselves do not take care of the issue.