By Flint Wheeler
Pressure is mounting on FIFA to rerun the bidding process for the 2022 World Cup in the wake of bribery claims against the hosts, Qatar.
Britain’s former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, a member of an independent governance committee set up by FIFA in the wake of previous corruption scandals, said that if allegations could be proved the decision to award Qatar the right to host the 2022 tournament could not stand.
Meanwhile, Australia and Japan, whose bids to host the tournament were rejected in favor of Qatar, have joined calls for FIFA to rerun the bidding process for 2022.
The Sunday Times obtained millions of documents that it said showed that Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari former FIFA executive committee member, paid between $3 and $5 million in cash and gifts to senior football officials to help secure Qatar’s bid.
The evidence has been passed to FIFA’s ethics prosecutor, Michael Garcia, a former US attorney in New York, who is due to meet Qatari bid officials in Oman on Monday as part of his investigation into the bidding process. There have been reports that Garcia had no plans to interview Hammam.
Goldsmith said the revelations should be thoroughly investigated. “After the revelations in the Sunday Times, if he [Garcia] wasn’t intending to see Bin Hammam he plainly has to now,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
Goldsmith added: “If FIFA is to emerge from the scandals, and this isn’t the only one – there are other issues – it has to produce a convincing and transparent answer to these allegations, particularly to these hosting decisions.
“If these allegations are shown to be true, then the hosting decision for Qatar has to be rerun … if it is proved that the decision to give Qatar the World Cup was procured by bribery and improper influence then that decision ought not to stand.”
Speaking of his committee’s finding, Goldsmith said: “What we identified as one of the issues that it needed to look at was the hosting decision in Qatar. We had seen what they [FIFA] had done in relation to it. We didn’t think it was satisfactory. And that’s why we insisted they look into this and Michael Garcia, former US attorney for southern district of New York, was appointed to be that investigator and that’s what he’s doing now.”
Yuichiro Nakajima, head of Japan’s unsuccessful bid to host the 2022 World Cup, said the allegations should be investigated by Garcia and backed calls for the bid process to be rerun. Speaking to Today, he called for wider reforms. “All of this points to the need for a major reform at how FIFA is governed,” Nakajima said.
The Australian football association has said it is “heavily involved” in investigating claims of corruption in Qatar’s successful World Cup bid.
The chief executive of Football Federation Australia, David Gallop, told local media it had been involved in interviews and the production of documents.
“We need to get more information about what’s been revealed in the last 48 hours,” Gallop told SEN radio in Melbourne.
“But don’t be under any illusion that we haven’t been heavily involved in all of this for some time now. We’ve been involved in interviews, production of documents and also following carefully what’s been happening away from Australia – so we’ve got people that have been involved for some time now.”
The Qatar 2022 bid committee said it had always upheld the highest standard of ethics and integrity in its successful bid to host the World Cup. Oh, except for the reported $5 Million bride to bring the World Cup to Qatar in the first place. Stay tuned…
