Soccer’s international governing body has extended its review of alleged corruption in the 2010 vote that sent the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar.
FIFA said that Domenico Scala, a Swiss businessman who is also the independent chairman of the organization’s financial monitoring panel, will study a 430-page report on the World Cup bidding process. Scala will then determine how much of that information should be made available to top FIFA executives, according to a statement posted on FIFA’s website Thursday afternoon.
Scala’s new obligations came after the two men clashing over the direction of FIFA’s corruption probe met Thursday at FIFA’s opulent headquarters near Zurich. Former U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia and German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert have been at odds over the results of Garcia’s wide-ranging investigation into the awarding of World Cup tournament hosting rights.
FIFA also disclosed Thursday that “a number of formal cases against individuals” have been opened based on Garcia’s inquiry. Those individuals were not named.
Last Thursday FIFA president Sepp Blatter sent Garcia’s report to Switzerland’s attorney general, where it was lodged as a criminal complaint against the unnamed individuals. According to the Associated Press, the Swiss federal prosecutor’s office will need time to review the 430-page report before making any decision on criminal jurisdiction.
American law enforcement is also investigating the opaque workings of FIFA’s executive committee, or “Ex-co.” The Daily News reported Nov. 1 that a former Ex-co member from the U.S., Chuck Blazer, is cooperating with federal agents and had at the FBI’s behest secretly recorded conversations with international soccer officials during the Olympics in London in the summer of 2012, among other places.
Blazer was a close associate of scandal-stained former EX-co member Jack Warner, a Trinidadian who resigned as president of CONCACAF, the North American-Caribbean soccer federation and from the FIFA executive committee in 2011 after he was implicated in a voting scandal for the presidency of FIFA.
The American investigation is being run out of the Eastern District of New York, in conjunction with foreign authorities, including the Swiss government, in examining possible crimes at the very top levels of international soccer.
A grand jury is hearing evidence in the case.
For a week, Garcia and Eckert have disagreed about publication plans for Garcia’s report detailing what he learned about the shadowy bidding process that sent the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.
Last week, Eckert produced a 42-page summary of the report that prompted Garcia to issue a statement hours later saying Eckert’s “statement” contained “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations” of his work. Garcia promised to file an appeal.
Garcia and Eckert lead FIFA’s Ethics Committee, a panel divided into an investigative arm (led by Garcia) and an adjudicatory arm (led by Eckert).
Eckert’s summary, issued last week, amounted to a decision to close the door on further investigation of the bidding process, which ended on Dec. 2, 2010, with the surprise announcement that the winning bids were Russia and Qatar.
Seven other candidate hosts (including the United States) had competed with those two nations, jostling for votes from nearly two dozen members of FIFA’s executive committee, led by Blatter.
