So predictable: Real agenda behind FIFA-gate emerges as Russia on verge of being stripped of 2018 Football World Cup
© Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images
Russia and Qatar could lose the rights to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups if evidence of bribery is found in the bidding process.
"If evidence should emerge that the awards to Qatar and Russia only came about thanks to bought votes then the awards could be invalidated," said Domenico Scala, the independent chairman of Fifa's audit and compliance committee, in an interview with the Swiss newspaper . "This evidence has not yet been brought forth."
Scala has made similar comments before but in light of the ongoing Swiss investigation and confirmation that the FBI has now widened its probe to include 2018 and 2022, his intervention takes on a new significance.
New evidence has emerged, meanwhile, alleging that the former Fifa vice president Jack Warner used a $10m payment from Fifa, made on behalf of South African World Cup organisers, for money laundering, personal loans and credit card payments.
The new evidence, obtained by the BBC, appears to show how the 2008 payments from Fifa - ostensibly for a Diaspora Legacy Programme promised by South African World Cup organisers - ended up in accounts controlled by Warner.
JTA Supermarkets, the largest chain in Warner's native Trinidad & Tobago, received $4.8m, according to accounts seen by the BBC.
The US indictment that charged 14 Fifa officials of 47 counts of racketeering and fraud had earlier alleged that Warner "laundered the funds through accounts held in the name of a large supermarket chain and affiliated investment company in Trinidad".
The documents also show $360,000 of the Fifa money was withdrawn by people connected to Warner, who was president of Concacaf for 21 years until he was suspended in 2011. He stepped down from his Fifa position a year later.
Nearly $1.6m was used to pay Warner's credit cards and personal loans, the largest of which was $410,000, according to the BBC.
The new documents show how Warner, implicated down the years in a string of scandals over two decades during which he ran Concacaf as a personal fiefdom alongside the general secretary Chuck Blazer, moved the money around.
Blazer has been cooperating with the FBI since at least 2011, when he was confronted over huge unpaid tax bills on undeclared commission on marketing and TV deals, and pleaded guilty to a string of charges in 2013.
He claimed in his testimony to a US judge, made public last week, that he was bribed in return for his vote on the 2010 World Cup.
© AFP
How dare they! Being all friendly...
His right-hand man, Jérôme Valcke, was revealed to have been told about the payments in letters from the World Cup organiser Danny Jordaan and from the South African Football Association (Safa).
Fifa had earlier claimed "Neither the secretary general Jérôme Valcke nor any other member of Fifa's senior management were involved in the initiation, approval and implementation of the project."
In a lengthy statement on Sunday, Safa again insisted that it had devised the programme in good faith and that it had not been created in return for Concacaf's vote in 2004. "It is a shame that this noble effort to support football development has now been turned on its head and camouflaged as a bribe rather than recognising the good that it was intended to deliver to the football programmes of Concacaf," it said.
Warner has continued to deny wrongdoing and in a televised address last week entitled "the gloves are off" he threatened to unveil an "avalanche" of evidence that would show why Blatter had resigned as Fifa president just days after winning a fifth term.
But there were renewed calls in Trinidad & Tobago to explain what he did with the cash and why it was paid.
Brent Sancho, Trinidad & Tobago's sports minister, told the BBC: "I'm devastated because a lot of that money should have been back in football, back in the development of children playing the sport. It is a travesty. Mr Warner should answer the questions."
In a separate development, the has published new claims from a former Fifa executive committee member saying the vote to host the 2010 World Cup was tampered with to ensure South Africa won.
The claims, dating from the newspaper's 2010 investigation that led to the suspension of two Fifa executive committee members ahead of the 2018-22 World Cup vote, allege that Morocco actually won the right to host the tournament ahead of South Africa but the result was altered by Fifa.
The former executive committee member Ismail Bhamjee, from Botswana, stated that following conversations with his fellow voters he had calculated Morocco should have beaten South Africa by two votes in 2004. He acknowledged that his fellow members could have lied to him about who they voted for but claimed that Fifa deliberately tampered with the vote.
"After talking with everybody ... Whose votes went where? We're all colleagues, you know. And then we found out that actually Morocco won by two votes," the reported Bhamjee as saying.
Bhamjee, who resigned from Fifa's executive committee after being implicated in a World Cup ticketing scandal in 2006 and was then suspended in 2010 following the investigation, had also alleged bribery during the 2018-22 race. The says that it supplied the evidence to Fifa five years ago but that it had not acted on it.
0 reacties:
Post a Comment