Investigator slams "incomplete and erroneous" FIFA report

Paris - FIFA's probe into the controversial bidding race for the 2018
and 2022 World Cups was thrown into turmoil Thursday after its own
investigator Michael Garcia complained that a summary of his report
misrepresented his conclusions.
Garcia, who carried out an exhaustive investigation into the bidding,
slammed an "incomplete and erroneous" version of his report and said
he planned to appeal.

Football's world governing body had earlier cleared Qatar and Russia
of corruption and ruled out a re-vote for the tournaments despite
widespread allegations of wrongdoing.
Garcia, a former New York federal prosecutor, spent 18 months
investigating the controversial World Cup race that ended with the
selection of Russia for 2018 and Qatar for 2022.

He issued a statement saying: "Today's decision by the chairman of
the adjudicatory chamber contains numerous materially incomplete
and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions detailed
in the investigatory chamber's report. I intend to appeal this decision
to the FIFA Appeal Committee."
Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of
FIFA's independent ethics committee, had revealed that the
investigation had not yielded evidence of corruption and there would
be no re-vote on awarding the tournaments to Qatar and Russia.

The report admitted that even though there had been a series of
worrying episodes in the bidding for the 2022 tournament, as well as
the 2018 World Cup in Russia, there was not enough evidence to
justify reopening the process.
"The report identified certain occurrences that were suited to impair
the integrity of the 2018/2022 World Cups bidding process," said the
42-page report.

"the occurrences at issue were, in the chairman's assessment, only of
very limited scope.
"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.

"The assessment of the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cups bidding process is
therefore closed for the FIFA ethics committee."
Qatar welcomed the decision saying they had been "confident" they
won the bid with a "clean" record ahead of rivals Australia, Japan,
South Korea and the United States.

The report also said that in Australia's bid for 2022 "there are certain
indications of potentially problematic conduct of specific individuals in
the light of relevant FIFA Ethics rules."
Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary-general of the Qatar 2022 organising
committee, told AFP: "We were confident that any impartial
investigation was to show that our record was clean and contains no
irregularities."

England bid criticised
The report also found no evidence of misconduct related to the
Russian bid for 2018, but added that not all records had been available
to the investigation.
The computers used at the time by the Russia Bid Committee had been
leased and then returned to their owner and destroyed, meaning
access to emails was not available.

The head of Russia's organising committee, Alexei Sorokin, said they
had cooperated fully with the investigation but that some information
had been "forgotten".
"We handed over to the investigation everything that we could. You
have to understand that four years had passed and some information
is simply forgotten."

Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, who is a member of FIFA's powerful
Executive Committee, told TASS news agency: "I was sure that this is
what would happen, our bidding campaign was absolutely honest."
However, the English Football Association (FA) was accused of
"violating bidding rules" in its attempt to win the right to stage the
2018 event which also included joint bids from Belgium/Netherlands
and Portugal/Spain.

It alleges that in an attempt to "curry favour" with Trinidad and
Tobago official Jack Warner, who was believed to control a block of
FIFA executive votes, the England bid team contravened bidding
rules.
England 2018 is accused of helping "a person of interest to (Warner)
find a part-time job in the UK" and sponsoring a gala dinner for the
Caribbean Football Union at a cost of $55,000 (44,100 euros).

The FA rejected the criticisms, in a statement on their website. "We
do not accept any criticism regarding the integrity of England's bid or
any of the individuals involved."
The FIFA report recommended a series of reforms to future bidding
processes in an effort to protect the integrity of the sport's most
lucrative showpiece event.
These include four-year limits on FIFA executive committee posts,
the FIFA Congress, rather than the executive committee, to decide
on future venues, a more transparent rotation system and a ban on
committee members visiting bidding nations.

- AFP

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