Lord Coe’s closest confidant, Nick Davies, has been sacked from his job at athletics’ governing body after lying to investigators about receiving secret payments totalling €30,000 from the disgraced former IAAF marketing executive Papa Massata Diack. However Davies, who was named Coe’s chief of staff when he became IAAF president in 2015, will be allowed to work in track and field again after the sport’s ethics board found him not guilty of corruption.

The decision came on a day when Coe faced renewed questions over when he became aware of corruption within the International Association of Athletics Federations, after fresh emails showed him referring to “serious allegations” involving the Russian athlete Liliya Shobukhova in August 2014 – four months before they became public.

Coe has always maintained that he only knew Shobukhova was blackmailed by senior figures within the IAAF – including Massata Diack, who was later banned for life – when they were broadcast by the German TV station ARD in December 2014.

But an email published by the culture, media and sport select committee from Coe to Michael Beloff, the head of the IAAF ethics board, from August 2014 appears to cast doubt on that account. In the email Coe tells Beloff: “I have in the last couple of days received copied documentation of serious allegations being made by and on behalf of the Russian female athlete Shobukhova from David Bedford … The purpose of this note is of course to advise you that I have now been made aware of the allegations.”

Coe, however, insists that the emergence of his email to Beloff does not change anything because he did not open the attachment that Bedford, the former 10,000m world record holder, sent him, which contained the details.

In a letter to Damian Collins, the chair of the CMS, Coe said: “To the best of my recollection I was not prior to December 2014 aware of the allegations that Papa Massata Diack/others associated with the IAAF were involved in covering up Russian doping. I did not read David Bedford’s documents but asked my office to forward them to the person and commission with exclusive authority to investigate.”

Meanwhile Davies will not be allowed to return to the IAAF after telling the ethics board he “had not been truthful” and had “misled” it over receiving secret payments from Massata Diack.

In his evidence Davies was forced to reveal that he was given payments of €25,000 and then €5,000 in cash by Massata Diack in envelopes. That confession came only after a leaked email from Massata Diack revealed that he had been paid for drawing up secret plans to delay naming Russian dopers before the 2013 world championships in Moscow and to “stop all attacks from the UK press” – and that part of the payment was to assuage his wife Jane Boultier-Davies, who worked in the IAAF’s anti-doping department and was raising questions about Russian doping. Boultier-Davies admitted receiving some of the money but denied it had affected her work in the anti-doping department.

The ethics board ruled that both were not guilty of corruption. In his evidence Davies said he was “never aware of any coordinated efforts to subvert anti-doping procedures and to extort money” from Shobukhova. He added: “I should have said that I had received money. But I was afraid that I might then be suspected of involvement in the extortion scheme and decided, wrongly, to deny that I had received any money.”