FIFA accused of cover-up by investigator
Hours
after a FIFA judge cleared Russia and Qatar of corruption in their
winning World Cup bids, the American who led the investigation said he
would appeal the decision to close the case because it was based on
“materially incomplete and erroneous” information.
In
what appears to be an open act of conflict within FIFA,
prosecutor Michael Garcia, who wanted his report to be made
public, criticised ethics judge Joachim Eckert’s 42-page report clearing
the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts.
Eckert’s
findings, which were released Thursday morning, were based on Garcia’s
investigation. Despite finding wrongdoing among the 11 bidding nations,
Eckert said the integrity of the December 2010 votes was not affected.
“Today’s
decision by (Eckert) contains numerous materially incomplete
and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions detailed in
the Investigatory Chamber’s report,” Garcia said in a statement released
by his law firm.
“I intend to appeal this decision to the FIFA Appeal Committee.”
Earlier,
Eckert formally ended a probe into the bidding contests, almost four
years after the vote by the governing body’s scandal-tainted executive
committee. No proof was found of bribes or voting pacts.
“The
evaluation of the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cups bidding process is closed
for the FIFA Ethics Committee,” the German judge wrote in a
statement released by FIFA.
“In
particular, the effects of these occurrences on the bidding process as a
whole were far from reaching any threshold that would require
returning to the bidding process, let alone reopening it,” he
summarised.
FIFA
President Sepp Blatter had earlier said that the criticism against
Qatar was racist while the 2022 organising committee maintained they had
followed the ‘highest ethical standards’ during the process.
The
report did criticise England’s bid for the 2018 tournament for
“inappropriate requests” from former CONCACAF President Jack Warner, a
FIFA powerbroker at the time, in what it said was “an apparent violation
of bidding rules”.
Meanwhile,
a report published by Amnesty International said on Wednesday that 2022
World Cup host nation is lagging behind on addressing concerns about
the abuse of migrant workers six months after it laid out plans for
labour reforms.
“The
legacy of the FIFA 2022 World Cup would be the hundreds of thousands of
workers who were exploited to make it happen,” the group said in the
12-page report.
In
May, Qatari officials announced plans for new legislation that could
eventually end the controversial sponsorship system in its current form.
Courtesy: Punch Newspaper.
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