FIFA and its president, Sepp Blatter, are facing a severe credibility crisis after the prosecutor charged with ferreting out corruption within and around soccer’s international governing body resigned in protest Wednesday.
Michael Garcia, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, cited a “lack of leadership” atop FIFA, where his two-year ethics probe has finally run into a wall of institutional obstruction. A report containing Garcia’s findings about how FIFA executives selected World Cup tournament hosts has not yet been made public.
Garcia’s resignation comes as law enforcement in at least two countries has taken an active interest in investigating FIFA’s executive committee (Ex-co), whose votes can mean billions in revenue for interested parties and immeasurable political prestige for a host nation’s political regimes.
As the Daily News first reported in November, a former Ex-co member from the United States, Chuck Blazer, has cooperated with an FBI and IRS investigation into FIFA based out of the Eastern District of New York, and at one point secretly recorded international sport officials during the London Games in 2012, as well as in other locations. The New York grand jury hearing evidence in the case could theoretically subpoena Garcia’s report.
The report has also been handed over to a public prosecutor in Switzerland, where FIFA is based and where the nation’s National Council is moving to create new laws regulating the financial affairs of FIFA and other sports federations. More than 60 groups, which include the International Olympic Committee, have headquarters in Switzerland.
“The report identified serious and wide-ranging issues with the bidding and selection process,” Garcia wrote in his statement, referring to the 2010 voting process by which FIFA executives selected hosts for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup tournaments. (Russia and Qatar won.)
The surprise development comes during a gathering in Morocco of FIFA’s executive committee, the international panel that convenes regularly in lavish conclaves to hobnob and vote on the multibillion-dollar business of world soccer. The Ex-Co is the central subject of Garcia’s investigation.
Garcia noted that his appeal could theoretically be taken further but said his “role in this process is at an end.”
“I have concluded that such a course of action would not be practicable in this case,” Garcia wrote. “No independent governance committee, investigator, or arbitration panel can change the culture of an organization.”
Garcia’s resignation statement implicates Blatter in an apparent effort to outmaneuver the inquiry, revealing that the executive committee Blatter leads had tried to open disciplinary proceedings against Garcia in September, when Garcia delivered a 430-page report.
The attempt to undermine Garcia — to accuse him of an ethics violation for his very limited public statements — was apparently rejected by the chairman of FIFA’s disciplinary panel.
Blatter claimed not to have seen Garcia’s departure coming.
“I am surprised by Mr. Garcia’s decision,” Blatter said. “The work of the Ethics Committee will nonetheless continue and will be a central part of the discussions at the Ex-co meeting in the next two days.”
For more than two years, Garcia had led an investigation into the shadowy voting process that sent the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. After Garcia was commissioned to probe the bidding process (hosts for both tournaments were decided in a single vote), he assembled a team of researchers and a Swiss deputy to handle certain aspects of the investigation.
“For the first two years… I felt that the ethics committee was making real progress in advancing ethics enforcement at FIFA,” Garcia wrote Wednesday. “In recent months, that changed.”
But after Garcia submitted his report in early September to FIFA, the prospects for a new era of transparency and fair dealing began to dim. The 430-page dossier went to the chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA’s ethics committee, led by German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert.
Almost immediately, Eckert indicated that the report would remain internal. In mid-November he issued a 42-page “statement,” disseminated through FIFA’s website, purporting to summarize Garcia’s findings and declaring that the World Cup bidding probe should be closed for lack of strong evidence of wrongdoing, and that the evidence assembled by Garcia was of limited scope.
Garcia, who immediately denounced Eckert’s statement as an “erroneous” misrepresentation, saw his appeal turned away Tuesday by a FIFA panel that deemed it “not admissible.” Today Garcia says that he has lost confidence in Eckert.
“(The) Eckert Decision made me lose confidence in the independence of the Adjudicatory Chamber, (but) it is the lack of leadership on these issues within FIFA that leads me to conclude that my role in this process is at an end,” Garcia said Wednesday in a statement.
Garcia’s departure lays bare the conflicts inherent in FIFA’s effort to reform itself under Blatter, who leads an executive committee that has been shown itself susceptible to corruption in the form of bribery and kickbacks.
Bonita Mersiades, a former bid organizer from Australia who became a whistleblower on FIFA corruption and cooperated with Garcia’s probe, welcomed Garcia’s resignation.
“The reform of FIFA into a democratic, transparent and accountable organization is the number one issue in world football,” Mersiades said. “Football fans and players should unite and say ‘enough is enough.’ It is time for a new FIFA. We should put pressure on our football associations, the sponsors, the broadcasters and our governments to intervene to demand this also.”
In his statement, Garcia questioned whether FIFA can change after years of scandals that have been exposed by journalists and governments. He said Eckert’s 42-page summary of the report contained edits, omissions and additions that “no principled approach could justify.”
“It now appears that, at least for the foreseeable future, the Eckert Decision will stand as the final word on the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cup bidding process,” Garcia wrote.
FIFA, in a statement including Blatter’s expression of surprise, said that its full membership would elect a replacement for Garcia, but that until then the executive committee — the very subject of the investigation — would appoint an acting chairman to serve in Garcia’s watchdog post.
