International soccer authorities, struggling to address an unprecedented inquiry into the shadowy World Cup bidding process, sidestepped complaints by the American investigator who authored a still-secret official report on the matter.
A Tuesday statement from FIFA suggests little progress by the sport’s international governing body in establishing a transparent account of how the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments were sent to Russia and Qatar four years ago.
FIFA now claims “there is no room and competence” for one of its many committees to handle a recent appeal by Michael Garcia, formerly the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who claimed his work had been misrepresented to the world.
Garcia had complained about a Nov. 13 “summary” of his findings, published on FIFA’s website, that Garcia said contained “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations” of his work.
“Not admissible,” says FIFA now, dismissing Garcia’s complaint about the 42-page summary, authored by Hans-Joachim Eckert, chair of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA’s ethics committee. FIFA now characterizes that document, which appeared on its website, as little more than Eckert’s personal musings.
“The chairman had merely commented on the Report of the investigatory chamber on a voluntary basis,” FIFA’s press release says. The statement claims Eckert’s statement “does not constitute a decision,” making it “neither legally binding nor appealable.”
FIFA’s top executives, led by president Sepp Blatter, are under a microscope as they gather this week in Morocco for one of their regular meetings, even as law enforcement agencies in Switzerland and the United States are conducting investigations into alleged corruption at FIFA’s highest levels.
The Zurich-based organization hopes to handle the World Cup host controversy as an internal disciplinary matter, but government officials and law enforcement in several nations have taken an interest.
Garcia, chairman of the investigatory chamber of FIFA’s ethics committee, is also interested in seeing the report help reform FIFA. His credibility is attached to the 430-page “Garcia Report,” for which he and his team conducted more than 75 interviews around the world and reviewed approximately 200,000 pages of relevant material.
The report has been handed over to a public prosecutor in Switzerland, where the nation’s National Council is moving to create new laws regulating the financial affairs of FIFA and other sports federations based there. More than 60 groups, which include the International Olympic Committee, have headquarters in Switzerland.
In the U.S., the FBI and IRS are pursuing an investigation of members of FIFA’s executive committee, or Ex-co, the internationally diverse group of FIFA members who cast votes on matters influencing the World Cup, where billions of dollars are at stake and the potential for kickbacks and bribery is extreme.
The Daily News reported last month that a former Ex-co member from the United States, Chuck Blazer, had cooperated with an FBI and IRS investigation based out of New York, and at one point secretly recorded international sport officials during the London Games in 2012.
With his Nov. 13 statement, Eckert, a judge from Germany, had apparently sought to shut down any further disciplinary cases against any of the nine candidates for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Experts say there is little chance of reassigning the tournaments now that preparations are under way.
Among the losing parties were Britain, where lawmakers have staged hearings about the bid committee’s work, and Australia, where a whistleblower revealed suspicious money transfers that may have been meant to woo Ex-co vice president Jack Warner, formerly a close colleague of Blazer.
FIFA also announced Tuesday a disciplinary committee judgment dismissing complaints by that whistleblower, Bonita Mersiades, and another one from Qatar, Phaedra Almajid. Both were interviewed as part of Garcia’s probe and protested that their identities were readily discernible in Eckert’s statement.
FIFA says the whistleblowers’ “breach of confidentiality claim had no substance” because they had made themselves known publicly and were not named in Eckert’s statement.
