The World Anti-Doping Agency’s decision to reinstate the Russian Anti-Doping Agency is a triumph for money over clean sport, according to the agency’s former director general.

David Howman, who ran Wada from 2003 to 2016 and is now the head of the Athletics Integrity Unit, strongly criticised the president, Sir Craig Reedie, for caving in to pressure from the International Olympic Committee and sports federations eager to stage events in Russia again.

“I am a little disappointed, to say the least,” Howman said. “This looks like they have taken the decision to deviate from a carefully put-together roadmap for entirely pragmatic reasons. Wada has gone from being an organisation that cared about clean athletes to one that cares about international federations that have not been able to stage events in Russia: it’s money over principle. That is a quite a difference, quite a swing, from what Wada once was.”

Rusada was suspended in November 2015 when its central role in the Russian doping scandal was first confirmed by an investigation led by the former Wada president Dick Pound.

The Canadian legal expert professor Richard McLaren conducted a second, much wider investigation in 2016, and its findings shocked athletes and sports fans around the world, forcing the IOC to block its member federations from staging events in Russia until it had a compliant national anti-doping agency again. One consequence of Rusada’s reinstatement is that Wada does not have to declare international boxing federation AIBA non-compliant for giving its 2019 world championships to Sochi.

The IOC has been pushing Wada hard to make such headaches go away and all six of its representatives on the 12-strong ExCo voted for the compromise deal on Thursday, with the IOC member Reedie also backing it. In fact, the deal, which was only finalised between Reedie and the Russian sports minister, Pavel Kolobkov, last week, sailed through by nine votes to two, a result that provoked a furious response from athletes groups and national anti-doping agencies.

Instead of Russia having to acknowledge its doping was state-sponsored and grant unconditional access to the Moscow laboratory’s data and stored samples before reinstatement (in line with the mutually-agreed “roadmap to compliance” Howman referred to), it now only has to admit that “certain individuals” were to blame, and the lab access comes with conditions and a new timetable. Like many in the anti-doping community, Howman is at a loss to understand why Wada has agreed to this.

On the issue of the IOC’s influence, the former IOC executive committee member said Wada had always “managed to walk the fine line” between the desires of its two sponsors, national governments and sport, “until Russia came along, because it was too big, too rich, too powerful”.