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FIFA files criminal complaint over World Cup bids
FIFA has filed a criminal complaint about the behavior of unnamed people involved in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process.
Leo Correa / The Associated Press
FIFA president Sepp Blatter filed a criminal complaint in Switzerland Tuesday.
ZURICH—The latest twist in FIFA’s World Cup bid corruption case has landed on the desk of Switzerland’s attorney general.
FIFA filed a “criminal complaint” against unnamed individuals on Tuesday, calling on Swiss federal prosecutors to investigate money transfers connected to the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding contests that were won by Russia and Qatar.
The unexpected move comes five days after FIFA had welcomed a “degree of closure” on the case.
“In particular there seem to be grounds for suspicion that, in isolated cases, international transfers of assets with connections to Switzerland took place, which merit examination by the criminal prosecution authorities,” FIFA said in a statement.
The significance of the dramatic-sounding request by FIFA President Sepp Blatter for a criminal investigation was far from clear. But FIFA said Swiss attorney general Michael Lauber will get all 430 confidential pages of American prosecutor Michael Garcia’s investigation.
Cup melee aftermath includes ticking time bomb: Young
Cup melee aftermath includes ticking time bomb: Young
Lauber, if he takes jurisdiction, could also have powers denied to Garcia, who was unable to force the handover of financial documents and phone records or to compel key witnesses to cooperate.
“The Swiss criminal prosecution authorities have the ability to conduct investigations under application of criminal procedural coercive measures,” the FIFA statement noted.
The Swiss prosecutors were brought in nearly four years after an often-discredited FIFA executive committee voted for the World Cup hosts after campaigns riddled with allegations of bribery, favor-seeking and voting pacts.
Tuesday’s announcement came five days after FIFA ethics judge Joachim Eckert’s summary of Garcia’s investigation was widely denounced as a whitewash of the Russian and Qatari bids, and FIFA voters.
But Blatter’s move certainly is a changed narrative from FIFA’s statement on Thursday following Eckert’s decision to close the case against the winning bidders.
That move was quickly challenged when Garcia appealed Eckert’s decision to FIFA, pointing to “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions.”
Garcia and Eckert are expected to meet Thursday at an undisclosed location to try to mend their professional rift.
The perpetual skeptics of FIFA’s motives are likely to see Tuesday’s announcement as an apparent move to avert criticism. Blatter said in an interview released by FIFA that he acted on a request by Eckert.
In a simultaneous release, Eckert said in a separate FIFA interview that he submitted his advice of a criminal complaint “more or less at the same time” as his 42-page summary report was published last Thursday.
Within minutes of that report’s release, a “whitewash” verdict was winning in the court of public opinion.
The Russian and Qatari bid committees have always denied wrongdoing and pledged to continue their World Cup hosting plans, costing each state tens of billions of dollars in construction projects.
Eckert conceded there had been “problematic” acts of rule-breaking among most of the 11 nations in the bidding process. However, he concluded that any corruption was “only of very limited scope” and did not justify reviewing the December 2010 votes.
Eckert said Tuesday the latest complaint concerns “suspected unlawful activity in connection with Switzerland.”
No details were given as to which financial or business laws Eckert or FIFA believe might have been broken.
Eckert continued to maintain Tuesday that “there is insufficient incriminating evidence” to question the FIFA board’s choice of Russia and Qatar.
Still, “there are indications of potential illegal or irregular conduct in certain areas,” he acknowledged, in stronger language than he used last week.
Those indications are still denied to a wider audience, including reform-minded newcomers on FIFA’s ruling board and others who want to know what evidence was unearthed.
Even Blatter insisted he has not read Garcia’s reports.
“I also was not the addressee of the investigatory report, which I have never seen,” the FIFA president said.
Whatever the Swiss attorney general decides, Garcia will continue to build cases against individual FIFA voters and bid staffers he has implicated in his case dossier.
“Much of this clarification work can be carried out by the FIFA Ethics Committee itself,” Eckert said Tuesday about Garcia, his committee co-chairman, “while the remainder is the responsibility of the relevant national investigatory authorities.”
FIFA World Cup melee aftermath includes ticking time bomb: FBI investigation involving former U.S. FIFA rep turned informant Chuck Blazer could deliver major blow.
Russia, which won the 2018 World Cup bid, and Qatar, the 2022 World Cup, were both cleared of corruption by a FIFA judge on Thursday, but the ruling noted that computers from the Russian bid had been destroyed and emails were unavailable. (Nov. 13)
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Even by the usual standards, the casualty list out of this international break makes for impressive reading.
David De Gea and Daley Blind. Mario Balotelli and Luka Modric. Claudio Ranieri and Dick Advocaat were unseated from the Greece and Serbia dugouts respectively, and Russia gaffer Fabio Capello, who has fallen up beautifully in recent years, may finally be on the way down. Even Republic of Ireland assistant coach in charge of distractions Roy Keane had a cameo, reprising Billy Martin to an autograph-seeker as the marshmallow salesman.
All of these can be put down to pro sport’s endless cycle of games, the demanding supporters that follow along, and in this case, soccer’s club-country tensions. There are winners (well played, you Faroe Islanders), surprises (San Marino! A point!), gnashing of teeth, flares and all those wounded. We’ll all reconvene in March for the next round, even if all it ultimately leads to is a 2016 European championship field cut by little more than half to a record 24-team bloat.
Such fun, but it pales next to the fallout from FIFA’s release of its summation of its internal investigation into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, which managed to trash everyone who co-operated. Transparency and disclosure, never the organization’s long suits, were left writhing on the pitch. There’s your major and entirely predictable casualty: house investigator Michael Garcia denounced the truncated release and called for his entire document to be made public, which FIFA says it can’t do; house “adjudicator” Hans-Joachim Eckert wondered why Garcia didn’t just invite him to go out for, say, lobster and champagne and a nice private chat; calls for external pressure, including for the European federation to quit FIFA and its headquarters in Switzerland, with its relaxed approach to annoyances like taxes and banking information, and bountiful chocolate.
As everyone knows, FIFA has no oversight in its role as the guardian of the world’s most popular game. It’s a game that has only grown bigger. According to perhaps the most eye-watering factoid in the report’s whitewash, World Cup revenues stood at $307 million when Sepp Blatter took over as president in 1998; in the last cycle up to this summer in Brazil the number was at over $4 billion. Amid all that money, Blatter’s particular political genius over the past decade and a half as boss (he spent 25 years before that, taking notes as one of FIFA’s gnomes of Zurich) has rested on tapping into the resentments and cash-starved aspirations of hitherto ignored member federations far from Europe’s traditional power base — hence, “football development” programs like Goal, and playing the great benefactor taking the World Cup to places like Asia, Africa and a soccer-less, broiling corner of the Middle East where governments roll over to grant tax-free concessions and spend billions on stadiums and infrastructure.
Perhaps this latest chapter will be FIFA’s undoing, but given Blatter’s survival rate, I doubt it. Still, against the growing political pressures on one side, there’s that FBI investigation involving former U.S. FIFA rep turned informant Chuck Blazer for alleged undeclared taxes that could well have more far-reaching implications. More names will emerge from that ongoing business, in different jurisdictions. In an era of increasing aggression, treaty-making and information-sharing among austerity-claiming governments intent on cracking down on tax avoidance — see Lionel Messi’s continuing court case in Spain, or former Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness, jailed in the spring after being found guilty of stashing tens of millions in Swiss accounts — it’s the same kind of mundane thing that brought down Al Capone’s empire. And unlike De Gea’s broken finger or Balotelli’s balky hamstring, it takes a lot more than a splint to fix — an international break for the ages, perhaps.
STEFFEN SCHMIDT / The Associated Press file
World Cup soccer revenues have grown exponentially under Sepp Blatter.
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