Said and Done Quatar Inquiry Special

It's so satisfying to see that the FIFA Inquiry establishing that only England's bid was corrupt was clear and transparent and based only on the facts.




Among the key Fifa figures who made the process so tight in 2010, as Sepp set about shaping the decade (“I’m working to make football a school of life, bringing hope, bringing emotions!&#8221:

1) Michel Zen-Ruffinen, Fifa’s secretary general until 2002, filmed before the process began setting out what it would cost to buy the votes of key executives. “The biggest gangster on earth” wanted £350,000; another was “a guy you can [get] with ladies, not money”.

2) Nigeria’s Exco member Amos Adamu, caught naming his price in a Sunday Times sting, months after telling colleagues: “The public sees every football administrator as corrupt, and I cannot explain why it is so. We must always be transparent to prove them wrong!”

3) Botswana’s Ismail Bhamjee, caught in the same sting offering to work as a fixer, four years after being caught in his first sting – touting 2006 World Cup tickets at three times face value to supplement his £270 daily expenses. “I got myself in a mess. It was out of character.”

4) Qatar’s Mohamed bin Hammam, who stayed transparent, revealing the scale of vote-trading should “not surprise anybody”, confirming he was “looking to the interests of Qatar”, and paying the legal fees for Tahiti’s Qatar-supporting Reynald Temarii, another sting victim. Last week’s report found Bin Hammam had no impact on the process, and no direct links to the Qatar bid team – whose head described him four years ago as “definitely our biggest asset”.

5) Thailand’s Worawi Makudi, who denied allegations over Qatari business deals; Cyprus executive Marios Lefkaritis, who entered into a £27m oil and land deal with Qatari interests, denied wrongdoing, and voted Qatar; and France’s Michel Platini, who voted Qatar for “football reasons”.

6) Brazil’s Ricardo Teixeira, who said press interest in his ethics record was “s**t”, denied multiple fraud allegations, resigned for “health reasons” and last year failed in a residency application to Andorra, a tax haven with no extradition treaty.

7) Cameroon’s Issa Hayatou and Ivory Coast’s Jacques Anouma, who both denied receiving £916,000 to vote for Qatar. Sepp said a later International Olympic Committee inquiry into Hayatou was pure hypocrisy. “The IOC? They have no transparency! They manage their money like a housewife.”

8) The USA’s Chuck Blazer, who denied fraud then turned FBI informant after facing a multi-million dollar tax bill; and Argentina’s late Fifa vice-president Julio Grondona, who denied voting for Qatar in return for $78.4m plus the proceeds of a Brazil v Argentina friendly in Doha on the eve of the vote to ease his FA’s debt crisis. “Enough with all this. The belittling of my good name must end.”

9) Russia’s Vitaly Mutko, who attacked the English press ahead of the vote for “portraying Russia as a hotbed of corruption”, days before a Russian federal audit chamber report found he had claimed expenses for 97 breakfasts eaten during a 20-day trip to Vancouver.

10) And Trinidad’s Jack Warner – who kept his nose clean and told the press: “Fifa preach equity. We live by our principle of fair play!”



Plus: What comes next …

Testing Fifa’s sense of closure: investigator Michael Garcia’s appeal against the summary of his inquiry, which he called “incomplete and erroneous”. The case will be heard by Fifa’s 14-man appeals panel, including Madagascar’s Ahmad Darw, who received $10,000 from Bin Hammam in 2008, and asked for more in 2010 via email: “As regards to what I discuss with the President Bin Hammam in Qatar … He promise to give me a help … Two possibility to send it … by bank swift or I can take it in Paris.” Darw denies wrongdoing.

 

They are all a bunch of arseholes.

 

From a casual observation, it seems like it was far from a secret that this is how the process has been run for a while, and the FA are only whinging about it now because they lost. Undoubtedly we were trying to secure votes in murky ways, like every other nation. I very much doubt this is a case of "plucky ol' England versus the cheatin' baddies"!!!!

About time it ended though and Fifa ran as an organisation that only had the interests of the game in mind.

 

Think the European teams should all withdraw from FIFA until all these non entity countries stop manipulating their votes for Blatter. They scratch his back and he scratches theirs.

 

Top post as ever Trevor.

 

I was interested to read the FBI and SFO may now get involved as they did with the Olympics when they were cleaning up their house.

I'm sure like JPF says we have been involved in some murky trading. We appear to have been the only ones stupid enough to disclose this! I laughed my socks off that Russia was also criticised, with the 42-page document finding that its officials had made "only a limited amount of documents available for review" because it was found that computers used at the time had been scrapped! What sort of amateur craic is this we have going on. FFS surely there should be mandatory inspection regulations in place that mean bids are able to be inspected regularly and post completion of the process.

Nobody is surprised and the apathy has led FIFA to be quite blase regarding just moving on past the obvious. Its like "yeah there is a big **** off elephant over there in the corner of the room, but I'm pretty sure we can carry on our meeting if everyone just pretends its not there"

It all just needs cleaned up. What has gone before in terms of the next couple, let sleeping dogs lie. However it needs to be fully investigated so that a proper structure and set of procedures can be put in place. Heads need to roll and a mass overhaul take place. It strikes me that the sheer numbers involved in the crazy fraudulent gravy train needs vastly reduced. Put the power back in the hands of the associations, FIFA is incompetent in its current guise anyway.

 

Actually, I was surprised at how clean the FA seem to have been.

Given that the FA seem to have made (everyone agrees) full disclosure, and given that FIFA were quite clearly dying to put the boot into the FA if possible, we can be relatively confident that the full extent of FA "murkiness" has been exposed. It consists of:

a. Allowing a carribean team to use our training facilities to prepare for a tournament;
b. Buying another carribean football team a nice dinner;
c. Helping a friend of the carribean delegate find a part time job;
d. Not returning a watch given as a gift to Greg Dyke because he had already given it to a charity to be auctioned off, having paid the £3,000 import duties on the watch personally.

In short, nothing beyond ordinary corporate hospitality, with the bit about the watch thrown in apparently for pure comic value.

 

Thanks very much for the comment.